MIFF Session 4:The Nowhere Inn

"This is how actors play rockstars." Annie Clark says in her St Vincent persona, pretending to smoke a cigarette while in her dayglo bondage stage outfit. She is, of course, a rock star playing an actor. We've already seen her as Annie explaining her real name vs stage name in a brittle and funny opening sequence when the driver of her white stretch limo tells her he's never heard of her. Soon after that she meets up with Carrie Brownstein who will make the documentary that we have been told remains unfinished, letting us know that the film we are watching is a layer outside of that. After we have seen some concert footage of the strident theatre rock she has continued from associations with the likes of Polyphonic Spree and Sufian Stevens, we see Carrie  trailing after her backstage, trying through gritted teeth to suggest that she be ... interesting. Annie resists this pleasantly to her real life friend but starts to wonder if she should be more like St Vincent offstage as well as on. Well, it's either that or a straight concert film and who wants that so, Annie, after stumbling on a few scenes which teach her a thing or two about others' preception of her, throws it in and becomes St Vincent all the time. This becomes a campaign of ruthless personality suppression and persona promotion that, with the increasingly troubled response from Carrie, makes this film what it is. And what is that?

It's an expression of fame's seduction and corruption, from dizzying satire to white knuckle thriller and trippy freak out does attempts at similar fictionalised attempts on Bowie, Freddy and Elton by country kilometres. The reason is not just in the self-reflexivity that can pre-apologise for indulgent tricks but keeping the tension between the depicted filmmaking and the actual filmmaking tight. This is made clear from the off but my favourite moment of it is a lot simpler than many of the devices it tries. In an effort to humanise St Vincent Carrie grabs a fan from the queue and takes her in to meet the idol. It's still Annie so she is nice to the young fan. The fan tearfully recounts the tragedy in her life that led her to cling to St Vincent's music which prevented the fan's suicide. Annie morphs facially into St Vincent, collapses in a chair at first genuinely affected but then obviously plaing to the camera. In a reverse shot we see the camera taking the close up we've just seen. The meta camera then registers Carrie's dismay at this show. It's plain, performance-forward and a great deal subtler than the film gets at its most flamboyant but it's all the more powerful for that.

This can only work with the committment by Annie Clark to match Carrie Brownstein's deadpan front. If that isn't done it's already the vanity vehicle it seeks to lampoon. This can be a little like a trick of a good singer singing poorly for a role and only works if you forget the talent chosen against the talent to get it wrong right. To her credit, the more Clark gets earnest the funnier she is, that goes for the whacked out extremes towards the end with her family show as well as the more poignant scene of her family reality which really does border on the painful (publicly at least). It's as good as the power of her stage performances and that's more than you can say of many. This is how rock stars should play actors.

Director Phil Benz keeps a firm hand on the tiller through the excess, never letting it escape into whimsy or indulgent cuteness. He and Brownstein are veterans of the deadpan, awkward humour that has dominated American comedy from the 2000s on (their work on Portlandia alone secures their place). It's as though he thought of the much bigger budget as a means to sharpen the tools rather than get a warehouse full of them. This meta satire plays fair from the start, never tries to be more difficult or profound that its material allows, gives Annie nothing she can't do and mixes the rock star and the film about her to a level where it's deliciously hard to tell the difference. And it's bloody funny. And comparisons be damned: first one to compare it to Spinal Tap is a rotten egg.