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I love you all: Frank
Insight
Movies of the Mind I love you all: Frank
Published Online June 14, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2215-0366(16)30140-7 Frank Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, 2014. Running time 94 min For more information see http:// www.magpictures.com/frank For Ronson’s memoir see https://www.panmacmillan. com/authors/jon-ronson/frankthe-true-story-that-inspiredthe-movie
Magnolia Pictures
Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie Jon Ronson, Pan Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 9781447265436
In 2005, Jon Ronson failed to win a radio award. Despondent, he left the posh hotel where the gongs were being given out and bumped into comedian Adam Buxton, who’d also gone away empty handed. “You know why we always lose?” Buxton asked, “We’re marginal.” Ronson found this observation reassuring: “I’d spent years frantically reaching for the mainstream—but I didn’t have to. It was fine. I was marginal. I could still tell these stories but they could do something else—they could dehumiliate, dignify.” Released almost a decade after that night, Ronson’s 2014 film Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, bears testament to the endurance of this mission to dignify. A fictionalised account of Ronson’s real-life experience playing keyboards for the comic character Frank Sidebottom and his Oh Blimey Big Band between 1987 and 1990, Frank retains Sidebottom’s huge banal/ menacing fake head, but ditches the biography of his creator, the real life Chris Sievey. Instead it tells us the story of another, imaginary Frank (this one played by Michael Fassbender), leader of the unpronounceable experimental band Soronprfbs. Ronson’s research drew on “great musicians who’d ended up on the margins”, and so Frank shares creative values, as well as a certain vulnerable naivety, with outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston and The Shaggs. Like Johnston, too, he has a history of mental illness. When the Soronprfbs keyboard player nearly dies by suicide, Frank hires the ambitious, musically talentless Jon (Domhnall Gleeson playing a kind of evil version of
Jon Ronson) to replace him. The band’s theremin player, Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking no prisoners) sees Jon for the “mediocre child” he is, but Frank is beguiled by Jon’s belief that they can find an audience for their music. In real life, it was Chris Sievey himself who wanted to find a bigger audience for the Oh Blimey Big Band. It was Sievey, not Ronson, who took the decision to book a thirty date tour and hire the kind of competent musicians that made them sound “like an excellent 1980s wedding band”. Up until that point, their audience was niche, to say the least: Ronson remembers a gig in Dudley (Sievey’s alltime favourite) attracting an audience of just fifteen, who eventually divided themselves into two teams, found a ball, and played a game. Gradually, however, Sidebottom’s reputation grew. He and the band moved from marginal to cult status, launching the career of Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton along the way. In his memoir of that time, Ronson recalls Sievey starting to believe they could go even further: beyond cult, perhaps, and all the way to the mainstream. The group imploded. Drawing on these tensions, Frank is a cautionary tale about the pursuit of fame, a hymn to the creative and protective power of the margins. When Jon’s relentless blogging and tweeting make social media stars of the Soronprfbs, he pushes them towards a supposedly career-changing gig at the South by Southwest music festival in Texas. But instead of making them successful, he’s turning them into something they’re not, urging them to compromise, be likeable, turn their backs on the “furthest corners” that nourish them. Thrust out of the margins and into the spotlight, Frank and the Soronprfbs realise that their so-called audience aren’t there for the music. They’re little more than a social media freak show, famous for their reliance on safe words (“Chinchilla! Chinchilla!”) to defuse violent creative spats. When Frank’s sanity crumbles under the pressure, guilty Jon finally understands that he has trashed the delicate ecosystem of the band with his ambitions. The film’s final scenes, in which he belatedly undertakes the Ronsonian mission (de-humiliate, dignify) and restores Frank to his rightful place, are deeply moving. Jon has always dreamed of shouting “Hello, South by Southwest!” to an audience screaming with anticipation, but it’s Frank’s less bombastic “El Madrid, it’s nice to see ya”, delivered to a mostly indifferent audience in a bar in the boondocks, that feels like a homecoming.
Laura Thomas
616
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 July 2016
Movies of the Mind I love you all: Frank
Published Online June 14, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2215-0366(16)30140-7 Frank Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, 2014. Running time 94 min For more information see http:// www.magpictures.com/frank For Ronson’s memoir see https://www.panmacmillan. com/authors/jon-ronson/frankthe-true-story-that-inspiredthe-movie
Magnolia Pictures
Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie Jon Ronson, Pan Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 9781447265436
In 2005, Jon Ronson failed to win a radio award. Despondent, he left the posh hotel where the gongs were being given out and bumped into comedian Adam Buxton, who’d also gone away empty handed. “You know why we always lose?” Buxton asked, “We’re marginal.” Ronson found this observation reassuring: “I’d spent years frantically reaching for the mainstream—but I didn’t have to. It was fine. I was marginal. I could still tell these stories but they could do something else—they could dehumiliate, dignify.” Released almost a decade after that night, Ronson’s 2014 film Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, bears testament to the endurance of this mission to dignify. A fictionalised account of Ronson’s real-life experience playing keyboards for the comic character Frank Sidebottom and his Oh Blimey Big Band between 1987 and 1990, Frank retains Sidebottom’s huge banal/ menacing fake head, but ditches the biography of his creator, the real life Chris Sievey. Instead it tells us the story of another, imaginary Frank (this one played by Michael Fassbender), leader of the unpronounceable experimental band Soronprfbs. Ronson’s research drew on “great musicians who’d ended up on the margins”, and so Frank shares creative values, as well as a certain vulnerable naivety, with outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston and The Shaggs. Like Johnston, too, he has a history of mental illness. When the Soronprfbs keyboard player nearly dies by suicide, Frank hires the ambitious, musically talentless Jon (Domhnall Gleeson playing a kind of evil version of
Jon Ronson) to replace him. The band’s theremin player, Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking no prisoners) sees Jon for the “mediocre child” he is, but Frank is beguiled by Jon’s belief that they can find an audience for their music. In real life, it was Chris Sievey himself who wanted to find a bigger audience for the Oh Blimey Big Band. It was Sievey, not Ronson, who took the decision to book a thirty date tour and hire the kind of competent musicians that made them sound “like an excellent 1980s wedding band”. Up until that point, their audience was niche, to say the least: Ronson remembers a gig in Dudley (Sievey’s alltime favourite) attracting an audience of just fifteen, who eventually divided themselves into two teams, found a ball, and played a game. Gradually, however, Sidebottom’s reputation grew. He and the band moved from marginal to cult status, launching the career of Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton along the way. In his memoir of that time, Ronson recalls Sievey starting to believe they could go even further: beyond cult, perhaps, and all the way to the mainstream. The group imploded. Drawing on these tensions, Frank is a cautionary tale about the pursuit of fame, a hymn to the creative and protective power of the margins. When Jon’s relentless blogging and tweeting make social media stars of the Soronprfbs, he pushes them towards a supposedly career-changing gig at the South by Southwest music festival in Texas. But instead of making them successful, he’s turning them into something they’re not, urging them to compromise, be likeable, turn their backs on the “furthest corners” that nourish them. Thrust out of the margins and into the spotlight, Frank and the Soronprfbs realise that their so-called audience aren’t there for the music. They’re little more than a social media freak show, famous for their reliance on safe words (“Chinchilla! Chinchilla!”) to defuse violent creative spats. When Frank’s sanity crumbles under the pressure, guilty Jon finally understands that he has trashed the delicate ecosystem of the band with his ambitions. The film’s final scenes, in which he belatedly undertakes the Ronsonian mission (de-humiliate, dignify) and restores Frank to his rightful place, are deeply moving. Jon has always dreamed of shouting “Hello, South by Southwest!” to an audience screaming with anticipation, but it’s Frank’s less bombastic “El Madrid, it’s nice to see ya”, delivered to a mostly indifferent audience in a bar in the boondocks, that feels like a homecoming.
Laura Thomas
616
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 July 2016