Frank

Despite sounding like a rejected member of ABBA, Lenny Abrahamson is an Irish director whose previous low budget films have been generally well received. He steps up a level here with a larger pot to play with and some major names within the cast. The plot is simple mind: Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), an aspiring young musician, joins a band ("You play C, F and G?", "Yeah", "You're in"), travels to Ireland with them to record an album and attempts to raise their profile via social media. However the band is full of eccentric characters meaning Jon and his band "mates" spend as much time arguing as they do putting down tracks. For British fans of surrealist comedy the main draw here will be the sight of band leader Frank (Michael Fassbender) wearing a papier-mache head for the majority of the film a la Chris Sievey's Frank Sidebottom character. However, apart from that striking visual, Abrahamson's film has little connection to Sievey's invention. In fact, what Abrahamson is actually aiming for is slightly unclear as he throws in so many themes (some of them contradictory) the film never quite settles in a sufficient fashion to be narratively coherent. The tone is a bit all over the place at times as well (there's a blackly comic moment where one of the main characters brutally stabs another), but Abrahamson just about pulls the film off by making it oddly endearing throughout. There's some nice digs at the pretentiousness of the music scene and the people who inhabit it (the band are so dysfunctional they don’t even know how to pronounce their own name) and we also get the best ashes gag since The Big Lebowski. If you can't stand indie quirk (cinematically or musically) then this won't be for you, but if you've got Captain Beefheart hidden away somewhere on your iPod then I suspect you'll enjoy this more than the average cinema goer. Rating: 6/10.