PARK CITY – One of the more tantalizing offerings at this year’s Sundance Film Festival promised to bring us one of today’s hottest actors — and then conceal him behind a large fake head.
The movie is “Frank,” starring Michael Fassbender in the title role as an avant-garde musical genius who wears a large cardboard head, Deadmaus-style, when performing but also wears it all the time offstage. (One of the film’s funniest moments happens when another band mate sneaks up on him in the shower).
The long-in-development film was inspired by the story of “Frank Sidebottom,” a comedy-musical figure created by England’s Chris Sievey, who in the early 1990s hired keyboardist Jon Ronson to join the band on a whim. Ronson, later a journalist and the author of “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” later wrote about the episode in the press and co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Straughan.
The film, directed by Ireland’s Lenny Abrahamson, is a whimsical delight about youthful ambition, heaving with nutty energy. It gets rolling when a woebegone would-be musician (Domhnall Gleeson of “About Time”) gets invited to join the bizarre American band (plus one Frenchman) in England right before a gig because their current keyboard goes insane and wanders into the ocean. He isn’t even asked to audition and the only question he’s asked about his qualifications is, “Can you play C, F and G?”
Onstage, the band (which has an unpronounceable name) uses a sound-collage combination of feedback, theremin, other dissonant noises and freaky sound effects to produce the kind of tunes only an art major could love, but Jon, the new member, becomes convinced they’re on to something and agrees to move to a wooded vacation spot in Ireland to record the group’s masterpiece, despite the hostility of a fellow musician (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who bonks our hero in a hot tub but (humorously?) threatens to stab him if anything goes awry.
Secretly Jon begins posting YouTube videos of the band’s hilarious rehearsal sessions, its infighting and its gathering of sound effects as the strangely charismatic (but also strangely dorky) Frank presides over the whole sound shambles. The videos, though, begin to attract a following, as does Jon’s Twitter feed, and the band scores an invitation to South by Southwest in Texas.
Gleeson (best known for playing a minor Weasley in the Harry Potter films) has already perfected the art of cringing disbelief, and yet his character’s bottomless willingness to try anything and go anywhere gives the movie a lot of heart. His regular-guy characteristics provide a perfect counterweight to Frank’s sci-fi strangeness. The first two-thirds are essentially a Philip Glass version of “The Commitments.”
Unfortunately, the considerable joy and goodwill the film builds up come crashing down in a total bummer of a third act, which leaves the audience with a bad taste in the mouth and dooms an otherwise ecstatically loopy film to the art-house circuit. As “Frank” is about a loser-genius, though, critics will gobble it up as they have many others along these lines, so it could well attract a top distributor.