Frank (Michael Fassbender), Domhnall Gleeson
“FRANK” My rating: C+ (Now at the Screenland Armour)
95 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Frank” is such an interesting idea, I wish I liked it more.
Lenny Abrahamson’s bizarro comedy is about a wannabe musician who miraculously is invited to join an avant garde rock band.
This aggregation of misfits is lead by a mad genius named Frank who lives 24/7 with his features covered by a huge papier mache head.
Except that there’s a whole lot more mad than genius in Frank, who is played by Brit actor Michael Fassbender (the “ X-Men” franchise, “12 Years a Slave”) exclusively through body language and his voice. Not until very, very late in the game do we see what he looks like beneath the big noggin.
Our narrator/hero is Join (Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendan), a mediocre pianist/songwriter who on a beach hear his home witnesses a fellow trying to drown himself in the sea. This poor benighted lug is the keyboardist for the band led by the mysterious Frank. And now the ensemble needs a piano player. Like right away.
Before long Jon finds himself whisked away to a remote recording studio in Ireland where, with Frank and other band members, he begins a long process of recording the group’s debut album.
Maggie Gyllenhaal (left)
Among the other players is the bad-tempered Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who plays the theramin (the early electronic instrument that provided eerie accompaniment for ‘50s sci-fi flicks) and who hates Jon from the get-go. There’s the band’s recording engineer (Scoot McNairy), who seems about this far removed from psychosis. And husband-and-wife Frenchies (Francois Civil, Carla Azar) who seem only to understand English when it suits them.
And then there’s Frank, a wildly creative if often incoherent felllow who drives everyone else mad with his fierce attention to detail. He’s such a perfectionist it doesn’t take a rock critic to realize this album is never going to be finished.
Except…except that Jon has been posting reports on the progress of the recording sessions on the Internet, and now the band has received an invitation to make their American debut at Austin’s South by Southwest Festival.
Wanna bet it does’t work out?
Written by John Ronson and based on his own tenure with a band led by the eccentric Brit performer Frank Sidebottom (who actually did perform in a big papier mache head), “Frank” is a bit too odd for its own good.
But I’ve got to admit that Fassbender does a remarkable job of establishing a character without the one thing actors usually place front and center — their faces. On that level, “Frank” is a one-of-a-kind oddity and a small (very) triumph.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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