Director: Matt Johnson
Stars: Dominic Sessa, Leo Woodall, Antonio Banderas
The international rollout for Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s crowd-pleasing cult hit Nirvanna the Band: The Show – The Movie has been so lackadaisical that here comes Johnson’s follow-up, nipping at it’s heels in the UK release schedule. In many ways it makes Nirvanna the Band Johnson’s cinematic outlier, as Tony reverts back to the biopic case study inclinations of his prior feature Blackberry, albeit with a far more casual, summer holiday vibe.
What’s offered does provide something of a welcomingly acidic tonic to the tired parade of hagiographic (mostly music) biopics we’ve been inundated with lately, taking a rancid, derogatory approach to it’s subject’s early years. In his best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain described his younger self as “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic”. Johnson, the cadre of writers and lead actor Dominic Sessa have really taken these adjectives to heart, fashioning a college-aged version of the man who is insipid to be around. Many of Tony‘s successes, then, come from the viewer’s deeply felt sense of schadenfreude whenever young Tony fucks up.
Somewhat hilariously, Tony attempts to mask the identity of it’s subject until the final scene of the film, something that the marketing team have (understandably) blown. We’re introduced to Bourdain as just another bratty, privileged Vassar student, talking up his pretentious hopes of attaining a writing scholarship with a lot of horseshit about splicing the styles of Salinger and Kerouac. An itinerant liar, Tony pretends he’s gotten the gig to all and sundry and uses this flimsy excuse to stalk a pretty girl called Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Cape Cod. Drunk, kicked out of seafood shack The Flagship and mugged by his future friend Sal (Leo Woodall), Tony winds up washing dishes at the same eatery under the cagey sponsorship of Antonio Banderas’ unnamed Chef.
Sessa, who turned many a head with his turn in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, successfully embodies the intended gangly arrogance belaying a husk of inexperience, often coming off like a less-confident Richard Ashcroft from the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ music video. Here it’s Tony who’s far more likely to be shouldered out of the way. Johnson’s film flits between having us laugh at an obnoxious kid who’s frequently getting what’s coming to him, and sympathising with the weedy dork behind all the unnecessary bravado. Sal – a hedonist who acts on pure impulse – is the natural foil for Tony’s clod-headed pseudo-intellectual, but neither present as bright sparks. Tony’s unthinking mouth frequently gets him into trouble, particularly with Nancy.
Ah, Nancy. The real thorn in this movie’s side. Obnoxiously underwritten, Jones isn’t culpable in the situation, making the best of – clearly – very little. The character rather blatantly exists purely as a marker for Tony’s developing sense of morality. There’s so little there. She’s a wisp. An object to withhold, present or rescind sexual gratification based on Tony’s behaviour. Four men’s names on the screenplay and not one of them can write a woman. It’s a sizable, conspicuous failing. As the shape of the film’s third act grows more defined – and, by extension, the shape of the whole – Nancy comes to feel like the worst of Tony‘s deferrals to the tropes of biopics of old.
Which is a shame because in other respects, this is an amiable, enjoyable summer hangout movie. The gross gallows camaraderie in the kitchen is the movie’s most comfortable mode, and a place where Stavros Halkias (Bugonia) gets a chance to work-up a memorable supporting bit. The best work, unsurprisingly, is proffered by Banderas, who takes every opportunity to underplay, gradually coalescing something far more interesting, lived-in and real than maybe even Johnson is prepared for. It comes to feel like a shame that he isn’t the movie’s centre. McCarrol provides the movie’s score (of course), but he’s eclipsed by the evocative ’70s jukebox soundtrack. The period is lovingly, scuzzily rendered by the collaborative art departments, however, and Michael Bauman proves a solid choice as DP, capturing these balmy days with the same winsome glint he found for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.
And there may be some sinuous connective brio to Nirvanna the Band: The Show – The Movie after all. Johnson is in his early ’40s now. Both of his recent films have a sense of looking back to them. Of recognising, however metatextually, the time that’s passed. Tony presents it’s antihero and Sal stumbling in and out of bars and parties with a kind of halcyon nostalgia that suggests it can all be viewed as a kind of mid-life crisis movie (sorry, Matt). Like the majority of coming-of-age stories, it pulls at audience memories of fledgling days. Bourdain’s later success hangs over Tony like a shadow, with the potential to excuse and even promote the bullshit artist behaviour depicted. Self-deprecatingly, maybe Johnson is channelling his own misspent days of being a young, cocky jerk? Don’t we all just look back and cringe?
The Lost Highway Hotel 