Frank Sidebottom was a musical alter ego of the late Chris Sievey, who gained some localised renown in England from the 1980s onwards with his massive papier-mâché head and cheerfully nasal song delivery. However, this film, which is co-written by Jon Ronson and based on accounts of his time in Sidebottom’s band, is not about Frank Sidebottom. It just takes the idea and image of that character and grafts it on to a far more thoroughgoing American story, one that trades on the legacy of outsider musicians like Captain Beefheart (the legend of him imprisoning his band to record the seminal Trout Mask Replica album), Roky Erickson and Daniel Johnston (whose mental health issues have been well documented) and perhaps a bit of Jandek (with his laconic public appearances). One needn’t necessarily know the music or stories of any of these artists, but Frank has its own catchy tunes, in amongst the rather more abstract noise, of the in-film (and unpronounceable) band Soronwfbs, led by the eponymous Frank (Michael Fassbender). Ronson’s own alter ego is the lead character Jon (Domhnall Gleason), an entirely annoying, self-interested twerp whose youthful naïveté also allows him to take on the challenge of joining Frank’s band, and whose self-absorption never seems to waver over much of the film’s running time. And yet, Fassbender’s largely masked performance has enough pathos that even when the film has transitioned from being an awkward comedy of Jon’s English manners to something altogether darker and more mysterious as the band slowly come together only to quickly fall apart, the audience is still on board.
CREDITS
Director Lenny Abrahamson; Writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan; Cinematographer James Mather; Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal; Length 95 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Haymarket, London, Sunday 11 May 2014.
filmcentric 