SUNDANCE ’20 REVIEW

SUNDANCE 2020: Scattershot ’THE NOWHERE INN’ A Meta-Movie About Celebrity Expectations

Name: Sundance 2020 review
Item: Sundance 2020
Rating: 2.7
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · February 3, 2020

SUNDANCE 2020: Scattershot ’THE NOWHERE INN’ A Meta-Movie About Celebrity Expectations

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Singer St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark) enlists close friend and filmmaker Carrie Brownstone to make a documentary about her biggest tour yet. The trouble is: she’s incredibly dull off the stage. She does her crunches, snacks on farm-fresh radishes, plays Scrabble. She is no feral rambunctious rockstar. Her Smell this is not.

The loosely-strutted mockumentary The Nowhere Inn is in a league of its own, as it doesn’t resemble the works of say a Christopher Guest or Rob Reiner. There’s not a lot of laughs here, nor is the project ever scary or thrilling (the at-times gut-punch strangeness are what quasi-classify this as a “midnight” movie) but The Nowhere Inn has things on its mind, particularly as it spins out the idea of the demands we make of celebrities, how expectation becomes folded into reality, the alter ego overshadowing the flesh and blood human.

Annie is in a bit of a creative rut, struggling to write songs, drained of inspirational juices, blathering on about vegetables. In lockstep with Annie’s struggles, Carrie can’t come up with an interesting angle to tell the behind-the-scenes juice when it comes to Annie’s exhaustive nerdy normalcy. The disconnect between the big spicy stage presence of St. Vincent and the mild-mannered, vegan-food-eating, yoga-pants-wearing lady is jarring. Worse still, it’s not compelling entertainment.

Carrie has a point: a “boring” (read: normal) celebrity isn’t worth their space in the tabloids. It’s why we don’t read about Tom Hanks’ personal life in People Magazine: he’s a nice guy with a nice family who eats vegetables and stuff. He’s not caught up in the bullshit. That petulant outsider quality, the freakishness, that is what the people crave. It helps heighten the sense of an “us” and “them”, giving meaning to the divide that exists between our world and theirs. The people can’t seem to understand why “normal” people can be stars while the rest of us must be content with our zero-to-fifteen minutes of the spotlight.

In this regard, The Nowhere Inn smacks a bit of the woes of the rich and the famous: despairing about why their fans demand superhuman mystique from them. As Annie nosedives deeper into her stage creation, St. Vincent, she untethers from her genuine self into the ether of celebrity. She spouts phony shit about wanting to “bridge the gap between audience and performer”, disappearing into the character, her kinship with close friend and documentarian Carrie strained, breaking.

Brownstein doesn’t actually direct – that role goes to longtime comedy TV director and Portlandia collaborator Ben Betz – but she and St. Vincent claim sole writing credits. Her transition from sketch show to feature film can be clunky and full of TV-ready act breaks, the movie too often struggling to find and maintain momentum as a feature. While the many musical interludes – cuts of live performances and MTV-esque music video pitstops – are a good entry point to St. Vincent’s impressive talents and discographical catalog, they can interrupt the already clunky pacing and distract from the story of ego overtaking superego.

Comic sketches, character transformations and even a Dakota Johnson sex cameo rub against musical numbers, talking head interviews, the past, the present, fiction, fact; a musically-motivated jumble of ideas that don’t entirely stitch together. Part documentary, part mockumentary, part rockumentary, The Nowhere Inn almost refuses to settle on a singular tone or style, which makes the narrative aspect a juggling act where balls are frequently falling. In a movie that’s all about the divide between self and performance of self, about knowing who you are, what story you are trying to tell, The Nowhere Inn too often feels like it doesn’t know what it is, what it’s doing and what it’s trying to say.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Nowhere Inn’ is one-of-a-kind experimental musical mockumentary that layers its meta commentary on celebrity expectations on top of sketches, live performance and frequent jarring tonal shifts. There are moments that work but it’s a project where the sum of its parts fail to leave much impact.