Week 9 – Frank

Why do films rely so heavily on music? Even films that aren’t completely revolved around film, its soundtrack is often one of the most integral characters in the movie. It sets the mood, the time, the pace for a couple of scenes until the next opportunity to play another one. It’s the music supervisor’s job to create another story from other people’s work that matches the one that the writer and director are trying to push through to their audience. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it really doesn’t. It makes or breaks a film.

Frank is a twofer, both having a great soundtrack and being a film about music. The film follows a young man in a humdrum town who is willingly kidnapped by an elusive and mysterious band – the helm being manned by an ominous figure in a rugby-ball-shaped papier mâché head named Frank. The film holds a story that is intricate and, for want of a better word, interesting; the story doesn’t go stale at any point, it’s almost as if Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan wrote a number of vignettes and sewed them together with the thread of our young man on the keys, Jon Burroughs (conscientiously played by Domhnall Gleeson).

The film takes us on a journey not unlike a lot of coming-of-age stories with a killer soundtrack. Frank reminded me somewhat of Almost Famous in that way where a young boy is taken to become a man under the wing of someone not necessarily altogether themselves. Not as epic as its brother before it (are British films ever epic?), Frank’s talent, its USP, is that it teeters on the edge of mania throughout, and when the wheels do finally come off of Frank and Jon’s band, “The Soronprfbs”, it’s more unsettling than explosive, which is in turn a very deft homage to the film’s star and subject, Frank Sidebottom.

The character of Frank Sidebottom, if you were not aware, was the brainchild of Chris Sievey who tragically passed away in 2013, and left behind a nation of grieving fans of comedy, the surreal and the silly. During this period of mourning, and finding out that Sievey was facing a pauper’s funeral, thousands of his followers got his albums and songs back in the charts, paid for his send-off in style and, arguably, paved the way for this 2014 film. The film stemmed from a stroke of luck, actually: literary welterweight Jon Ronson wrote an absolutely gorgeous piece on his time with Sievey and what Frank Sidebottom – the real Frank Sidebottom – meant to him.

It does beg to be asked whether Frank is in fact a tribute to the late Sievey or, principally, a piss-take to a silly gimmick gone too far. Watching the performances – Maggie Gyllenhaal is as ever worth a shout-out for her barbed performance (a line to take away: “stay away from my fucking Theremin”) – and knowing the history behind this film proves that this isn’t a parody. In no way can you watch this and not feel like this was the true send-off that Frank and his big old napper needed.

Films of the Week: Frank, Chicago, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, Mamma Mia