Delayed Reaction: Frank

The Pitch: Michael Fassbender is the leader of an eccentric pop band who wears a full-head mask all the time.

I see a lot of movies, however I wouldn't say I see a diverse mix of them. I don't see many foreign movies or movies older than me. I'm pretty mainstream in my tastes. Even the indie movies I see are in that "indie in budget only" category that still get a lot of big names attached to them. That makes it hard to discover a movie that I can feel pretty confident that I'll like it that I haven't seen before. Normally, I store this movies like acorns in the winter and pull them out whenever I get particularly despondent about the choices I have. Frank is one of these movies. It checks a lot of boxes. It's directed by Lenny Abrahamson, right before he made a little movie I loved called Room. It's got Michael Fassbender, sandwiched between two Oscar nominated performances in 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs, wearing a papier-mache* head nearly the whole time. There's Domhnall Gleeson, fresh off About Time, and preparing for a huge 2015 (Ex Machina, Brooklyn, The Force Awakens, The Revenant). I can't forget Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has eternal Stranger Than Fiction goodwill from me. It's a Sundance movie, and anyone who tracks my December Reactions in particular will know that I love to binge through what that fest has to offer.

*This is the first time I ever realized that it is 'papier-mache', not 'paper-mache'. Am I the only one who didn't know that?

The movie was about what I expected it would be. Sundance movies almost always have a short story feel, like this isn't the full story they wanted to tell. Frank feels like it has a little more that it wanted to do. Fassenbender gives an impressively complex performance, given that he's in a head mask nearly the whole time. The rest of the band is gung-ho on playing up the weirdness. Special shout out to Maggie Gyllenhaal who has a lot of fun playing angry. Gleeson is mostly just responding to the world of Frank's band but he's also trying to understand it. He's used to being the oddball outsider in town, and suddenly he's the traditional, bland one in the group. It's great seeing how he tries to process that and how even the lightest of dabbling in Frank's affairs can throw off the entire balance of the group. It's a shame that the story didn't know what it was building toward and peters out in the third act. I do love Frank's song at the end though. It has been periodically stuck in my head over the last few days. The movie is definitely more clever than funny, but its charms and quirks are plentiful enough to sustain the weaker parts. I enjoyed this, even when I wasn't sure what I was watching.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend