WHO IS KK DOWNEY? (Darren Curtis, Pat Kiely). 90 minutes. Kidnapper Films. Saturday (October 25) at Royal Cinema. See Indie & Rep Film. Rating: NN
From the moment the pre-?title disclaimer appears – something about any resemblance to real people, places or events being “fucking coincidental” – you know the kind of too-?cool-?for-?school hipster wankfest that’s coming.
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Who Is KK Downey? clearly resembles (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) a lot of people, places and events. Of course, this debut feature from Montreal sketch comedy/film troupe Kidnapper Films is all in the name of social satire.
Except that what it’s supposed to be satirizing – the indie-?obsessed irony-?for-?irony’s sake artistically anemic alt-?subculture you find lurking around the Drake on Saturday nights like skinny-jeaned vampires – is already a pretty unamusing (and purely unintentional) self-?parody.
Terrance (co-?writer/co-?director Darren Curtis) and Theo (co-?writer Matt Silver) want to be famous, but Terrance’s band sucks and the book Theo wrote, Truck Stop Hustler, has been rejected because, really, what does an upper-class suburban snowflake know about sucking dicks for spare change by the highway?
So they invent an abused, homeless, transgendered teen prostitute named KK Downey and claim the book is autobiography. KK becomes an instant celebrity not unlike JT LeRoy, the supposedly real-?life transsexual truck-?stop hustler who turned out to be a middle-?aged white woman who just wanted her novel published.
Of course, things get downright vicious when a smug, pseudo-?intellectual music journo who’s dating Terrence’s ex becomes suspicious of KK’s story.
The performances are uneven, the lighting and cinematography sketchy and, worst of all, the jabs at hipster culture rarely connect.
