Frank, 2014
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson.
Starring Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
SYNOPSIS:
A young musician joins an eccentric band led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank.
Lenny Abrahamson released a terrific film called What Richard Did last year. Leaving the theatre left you slightly winded, as was the movie’s moral punch. It was a nice moral punch, though. One you could affectionately rub the bruises of a few days later and contemplate the integrity of man.
Frank is Abrahamson’s latest work, a sort-of-adaptation of Jon Ronson’s writing about his time in alternative 80s comedian Frank Sidebottom’s band. The film captures the spirit of Ronson’s experiences rather than directly translating them to screen. Consequently, the film is set in the modern day, with YouTube, Twitter and South by Southwest pervading the narrative.
This frees the story from its ‘real-life’ constraints to instead focuses upon what it’s like to become obsessed by a manically creative force. This force takes the form of Frank (Michael Fassbender), a giant papier mâché head-wearing eccentric and musical genius, with Jon (a very endearing Domhnall Gleeson) as the obsessed.
He never takes it off. The head, that is. Not even in the shower. All his food comes through a straw. His balance is slightly off, and he’s forever bumping into door frames through a lack of peripheral vision. Initially, it’s unnerving; a grown man standing there with a simultaneously wide-eyed innocence and blow-up sex doll expression on his face. Jon brings the awkwardness up, so Frank starts stating his facial expression out loud to ease their interactions. “Delighted smile!”
After a while you become accustomed to it, and like any blank slate, you find yourself filling in the gaps. Fassbender is incredible in this movie, you’ll think to yourself, falsely remembering a subtle curl of the lips or narrowing of the eyes. But Frank’s face never changed, you imagined it – just like how your imagination fills in the visuals for radio. It’s a neat microcosm of the central mechanism of cinema itself: projection.
Maybe Frank (both the film and the character) loses its way a tad in the South By Southwest segment near the end. There’s so much energy trapped within the cabin walls where they spend the majority of the movie beforehand, struggling over many, many months to record their first album, that the scenes set in the vast plains of the American West feel dissipated. But Abrahamson expertly guides the narrative back, with the concluding scenes being the film’s finest; a deeply moving, slow unraveling of the man behind the mask.
Frank is a different, lighter film to What Richard Did. A sense of deep melancholy is persistent in both, but in Frank there always remains a sense of hope. Perhaps it’s those wide, boyish blue eyes of his. The ones that seem to smile when he grows excited about a new sound, even though they never moved.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter (@OliDavis).
Originally published April 26, 2014. Updated November 28, 2022.
