I’m in two minds about this movie. On one hand, its delightfully quirky and features some powerhouse performances from Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson. On the other, it seems to perpetuate the idea that mental illness is somehow linked to creativity. I’m all for allowing people their quirks and eccentricities, but the movie seems oddly indulgent of a crazy bunch of misfits who are all hanging out together but not achieving much at all. In a practical world, would this sort of existence yield them sustenance? Fassbender is the star and redeeming factor for the movie – pitch perfect in his role of a enigmatic musical genius with his head perpetually hidden underneath a papier mache mask. It is proof of his acting prowess that even without giving us access to his facial expressions, he is able to etch a larger-than-life character who becomes instantly identifiable through voice, posture and movement. He emotes beautifully, whether composing an ode to an errant carpet strand, or wryly saying his facial expressions aloud to help Jon understand what he’s thinking, or being incredibly anal about the number of times the band has to rehearse their album before he feels they’re ready to begin recording.
Domhnall Gleeson is Jon, a drifter and wannabe songwriter, who, after a chance encounter, gets invited to moonlight as the keyboardist for pretentiously avant garde and honestly crap-sounding punk band The Soronprfbs. Nobody gets their music, including the musicians themselves, but they all rally around their messiah-like lead singer and guiding spirit Frank, played by Fassbender. There’s Scoot McNairy as the band manager, who was also an ex-guitarist, with his own problems. An intense, but largely silent and irrelevant, couple play the drummer and guitarist respectively, with the latter spewing French lines with noteworthy venom. And then there’s Maggie Gyllenhaal is Clara, slinking around in silk robes and looking pained as she ekes screeching notes out of her theremin, most pretentious of them all and looking frankly irritated with the whole concept. I read somewhere that Gyllenhaal had initially refused the role before she decided to take it up. If you ask me, she looks as if she never forgave herself for changing her mind.
Jon wants to bring some form of public support and acclaim to the band, and is adept at manipulating social media to garner some interest. In his naive earnestness and quest for elusive creative genius, he donates his nest egg to the band, and one would think its perfectly fair to allow him to have some say in the future of the band. However, The Soronprfbs are the antidote to every punk rock band ever – they don’t really make good music, they have nothing much to say through their songs, and they don’t want to get famous. At least, not everyone. Frank, channelling The Lizard King in his stage antics and spoken word poetry, begins to trust Jon and believes him when he says they are talented, have a fan base and can get famous. Clara resents Jon intensely and is fiercely protective of Frank, believing that the whole farce of a public performance will be his undoing. As it turns out, she is right, and Frank’s fake head is not so much a marketing gimmick as an effort to hide himself away from the outside world.
The end takes too long to come, and by the time it does, you already know where its going. What started as a lighthearted comedy, quickly takes a grim turn and becomes quite predictable, losing whatever quirky charm it had in the process. It should really have ended when Frank takes off into the great American unknown, after his argument with Jon. That would have left it slightly more open-ended and still sent the message the director wanted to. But, ultimately, Frank proves that too much of a good thing is also bad.
My Rating: 3/5 (For Fassbender’s fantastic performance)
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