FRANK directed by Lenny Abrahamson, written by Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan, with Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy and Michael Fassbender. A VSC release. 95 minutes. Opens Friday (August 15). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
Frank Sidebottom was a deliberately impenetrable British performer who sang insane songs while wearing a giant papier mâché head. Really, though, he was musician and comedian Chris Sievey, and writer Jon Ronson played keyboards for him in the late 80s.
A quarter-century later, Ronson has written a movie called Frank. It’s a fictional interpretation of the Sidebottom character, following a bored young man named Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) who impulsively joins Frank’s band and winds up recording an album and gearing up for a SXSW showcase.
None of that actually happened, of course. As Ronson explains over a noisy cellphone connection from New York City, what he wants to do in the movie is communicate Sidebottom’s appeal and his music rather than recount the story of the artist’s life.
“When all the Frank Sidebottom fans saw the film, nobody objected,” says Ronson. “Everybody really liked it and understood what we were doing. And, in fact, making something experimental and completely fictional is more honest, I think, than making some kind of middling semi-biopic that’s sort of true and sort of not.
“You know what you’re getting with our film: it’s completely not true,” he says, laughing.
Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare At Goats was made into a movie starring Ewan McGregor and George Clooney, but Ronson wasn’t involved with the adaptation. He collaborated on the Frank script with Goats screenwriter Peter Straughan, and admits there was a bit of a learning curve.
“I remember Peter saying to me with kind of a patient look: ‘It’s okay, we’re allowed to make things up,'” Ronson laughs. “And after that I be≠gan to sort of understand how to do it. I loved it. I loved turning myself into this pitiable monster [on screen], this kind of Salieri. It was liberating, really fun to feel free to take what you want from reality and just completely make up whatever we wanted.”
The final product bears almost no relation to the Frank Sidebottom story… except when it does.
“The thing that’s interesting, the thing that felt like it had a real moral heart to it, was this idea of the clash between the mainstream world and the world of outsider artists,” he says.
“In a way, I think it’s a moral story about how you don’t have to chase success. It’s okay to be marginal. And it’s kind of okay to fail. In a successful world, it’s nice to make a film that kind of celebrates failure.”
The themes of Frank tie in nicely with Ronson’s next book, which he’s just finished.
“It’s about public shaming,” he says, and how the mainstream treats people who become viral sensations. “Some we turn into heroic figures, but others are just trapped as monsters.”
I have to ask Ronson if he’s been following the Rob Ford story out of professional interest.
“I’ve followed it a bit,” he says. “I dunno, I kind of started feeling sorry for him, and I felt like I didn’t want to carry on following the stories.”
Interview Clip
Jon Ronson on figuring out what kind of movie Frank was going to be:
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
