Fiddly Digits, Itchy Britches

Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is a struggling, crappy songwriter, living at home with his mom and dad and working in a cubicle. In one of Frank’s first scenes, he’s struggling to compose a pop ditty and realizes he’s plagiarizing Madness note for note.

Then one day while sitting on a park bench, he witnesses police save a man from drowning by suicide. It turns out the man is a keyboardist in what can kindly be described as an avant-garde rock band called The Soronprfbs. After a brief conversation with the manager, Don (Scoot McNairy), Jon is on stage filling in for the night.

The gig goes horribly because of an altercation between Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the band’s other keyboardist, and bassist Baraque (François Civil). It’s such a violent fight that one almost doesn’t notice the band’s lead singer, Frank (Michael Fassbender), is a man who wears a papier-mâché head. But Don likes Jon, and he’s hired to join the band for recording sessions.

To say the sessions are fraught with tension is an understatement. At points, Don threatens to kill himself, and Clara takes out a pocket knife and tells Jon she’ll stab him if he destroys the group dynamic.

Then there’s Frank, who never removes the papier-mâché head, even in the shower. As it turns out, Frank suffers from mental illness (so does Don). But Frank has a gift; he can bang out a tuneful and sweet melody without thinking. He can also labor for hours opening and closing a door because he thinks it’s the perfect percussive sound effect. And Jon, because he’s been floundering on his own, and because he genuinely loves Frank’s better impulses, decides to push the band toward the mainstream.

It should go without saying that nothing goes according to plan, but the ways the plans go awry are by turns touching, funny and terrifying. For example, when Jon gets the band invited to South by Southwest and suggests Frank write something likable, the lyrics Frank comes up with—“Coca Cola, lipstick, Ringo, dance all night, dance all night”—are so off the wall, one wonders how Jon ever thought Frank could function at a major music festival.

But that’s one of Frank’s charms. It doesn’t concern itself with asking why its characters do things. They just do things, though Jon’s motivations (he’s ostensibly normal) make sense. Frank’s motivations probably make sense, too, but perhaps you’d have to be afflicted with the same kind of mental illness as he to understand them. Frank also doesn’t shy away from mental illness, and it doesn’t attempt to explain it.

Co-screenwriter Jon Ronson came up with the story after spending time as a keyboardist for Frank Sidebottom, the alter ego of Chris Sievey, an English musician and comedian. The visual look is spot-on—Google it—and that’s where the similarities largely end. Frank is subtly about relationships, ambition and limitations. Frank Sidebottom was not.

What’s really fascinating is how good many of the songs are in Frank. (Frank Sidebottom is unlistenable.) And Fassbender has a gift for comedy, even if the comedy is rooted in tragedy. The movie is also unafraid of leaving things unfinished—many of the songs are fragments—or of ending on a bittersweet note. But how many things end the way we want them to end? Frank is gleefully weird, and if you’re willing play along, you’ll be caught up in its weirdness, and even lifted by it.

Directed by Leonard Abrahamson

With Fassbender, Gleeson and Gyllenhaal

CCA Cinematheque
R

98 min.