“I say tell everyone everything. I mean, why cover anything up?” The man
speaking this line is wearing a papier-mâché head with wide-set painted blue eyes
and bee-stung lips. His name is Frank and he’s a singer in a band. The head
doesn’t come off. It’s therapeutic. Frank has a certificate.
In the first of director Lenny Abrahamson’s wilful ironies, the man in
the head is played by one of the current cinema’s most handsome leading men,
Michael Fassbender. He’s explaining his song-writing philosophy to Jon (Domhnall
Gleeson), a keyboard-player and wannabe rock star who has just joined his
unpronounceable band Soronprfbs. And Jon doesn’t get it. The band is holed up
in a cabin in the Wicklow
Mountains, supposedly
recording an album. They’ve been there for a year, having gotten lost on the
way to superstardom, a place nobody but Jon wants to go.
That’s the set-up for Abrahamson’s off-beat musical comedy Frank which
shares something with the director’s previous films in that the story contains
a nugget of truth. There really was a rock singer named Frank Sidebottom who
wore a papier-mâché head and he was joined, for a brief period, by a keyboard
player who wanted to be famous, the writer Jon Ronson, who scripted this story
with Peter Straughan. From that kernel of inspiration, Abrahamson has
constructed a funny, tender and endearingly daft film that captures the spirit
of creativity like lightning in a bottle then tries to break the bottle over
your head.
We first meet Gleeson’s Jon as he is enlisted into Soronprfbs to play a
gig when their other keyboardist runs screaming into the sea. The previous
incumbent had been driven to his demented soaking by the rest of the band,
including Theremin-playing Clara (a brilliantly sour and suspicious Maggie
Gyllenhaal), aloof bassist Baraque (François Civil), passive-aggressive drummer
Nana (Carla Azar from the band Autolux) and manager Don (Scoot McNairy). The
gig does not go well but Jon joins up anyway, taking the ferry to Ireland
under the pretence of another live date. “You can play C, F and G, right?” asks
Don, with a squint. They end up trekking into the mountains to record a long-promised album,
rehearsing in a close-quartered cabin and finding inspiration in the wild world
around them. Tweeting his experiences incessantly, and slowly gathering
followers, Jon secures the band a slot at the prestigious SXSW festival in Texas and Soronprfbs reluctantly
hit the road. And like every road trip ever undertaken by a ragtag gang of
movie characters it turns out to be their undoing.
Frank wouldn’t work if the music didn’t work. From under the head,
Fassbender proves a magnetic front-man, delivering a masterclass in physical
performance through little more than undiluted charisma. As we watch Frank lead
the band through their unconventional rehearsals, or weaving around on-stage,
the music from composer Stephen Rennicks takes an identifiable shape. Songs are
delivered in burps and snatches as Soronprfbs generate a sound unique to
themselves but inspired by outlying musicians like Captain Beefheart, Daniel
Johnson and The Residents.
Abrahamson’s uncanny control of tone and mood nudges Frank from a
kind-of comedy to a kind-of tragedy, bumping up against almost every point in
between. Partly an exploration of the unknowable methods of the truly creative,
and partly a discussion about how fame and celebrity are cheap commodities in
the internet age, Frank is a consistent and enduring delight. It’s a film about outsiders who feel no particular urge to come
inside. An unexpectedly
poignant conclusion makes astute observations about how analysing the creative
process can destroy it, and damage the source of creativity itself.
