Despite the lip service we pay to the importance of authenticity, art and artificiality often become intertwined. An artist’s persona can develop into a façade, even an alter ego, and with increased fame comes a greater blurring of the lines between where the performer ends and the real person begins. This is not a new concept, and in their co-written screenplay, real-life friends Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein know there’s no great revelation in its authentic exploration. So instead, they adopt a metacinematic approach by infusing humor and surrealism into The Nowhere Inn, a movie about a fake tour documentary for Clark’s popular and everchanging stage presence as St. Vincent.
Much like Brownstein’s work in “Portlandia,” the comedy here comes off as more oddly amusing than downright funny. The film’s main punchline, and really the only coherent storyline, consists of documentarian Brownstein realizing that Clark’s life, even on tour, is far more boring than her glamorous and kinetic performances as St. Vincent would indicate. On tour in promotion of Masseduction, an album that adds another meta layer in that it comments on the artificial nature of fame-driven consumer culture, Clark just hangs out and plays Nintendo Switch, occasionally ruminating on such less-than-spellbinding topics as her affinity for the earthiness of radishes and distaste for the masking nature of salad dressing.
When Brownstein confronts Clark with the reality that a documentary about just hanging out and relaxing isn’t going to work, Clark takes this as a call to action and veers wildly in the other direction. The film, which is actually directed by Bill Benz, also tilts toward the strange and surreal at this point, as Clark’s increasing layers of artificiality begin to swirl together to the point that faux filmmaker Brownstein has trouble deciphering what is real and what is performance—can she even fire her own assistant, or is that person merely playing the role of her assistant? In its third act, The Nowhere Inn grows positively Lynchian, both in its gauzy, theatrical aesthetic (along with the fact Clark’s look would seem to fit naturally in the Mulholland Drive universe) and in its nested doll approach to films within films, which is essentially lifted (and perhaps watered down) from Inland Empire.
Eventually, the strange bits begin to feel like “Portlandia” sketches, non sequiturs that serve fine as standalone curios but don’t quite propel the film toward anything of much substance. Clark donning a cowgirl getup and sitting down at a Texas BBQ seems purposely against type until one realizes that while St. Vincent may be more synonymous with New York City, Clark was indeed raised in the Lone Star State. And while a cringey scene featuring Clark and her “girlfriend” Dakota Johnson (playing a version of herself) awkwardly filming in lingerie may riff on Clark’s high-profile real-life relationships with Kristen Stewart and Cara Delevingne, many of these sequences really only seem tangentially related to who Clark really is.
And that seems to be the point of The Nowhere Inn. Clark is famously private, to the point that David Byrne has said that, even after touring together for a year in support of their collaboration Love This Giant, he didn’t really get to know her. The Nowhere Inn, of course, isn’t meant to reveal the real Clark. Instead, it pokes fun at the notion that such a thing is possible, and perhaps even argues that we’re all just an accumulation of our various façades—even more so for those who concoct new personas for a living. That results in a film that’s entertaining enough and worth of a watch for fans of Brownstein or St. Vincent, but one that’s far more self-indulgent than revelatory.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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