If ever there were a pop star in desperate need of artistic legitimization, it’s Machine Gun Kelly. Talented though he may be, he’s known less in some quarters for his musical output than for his image and persona. For some, he’s just another heavily-tatted poser, a white boy wannabe occupying a place of prominence in the pop culture scene that could have been filled by a young Black rapper. For others, he’s the scrawny, attention-seeking other half of Megan Fox, more often seen on the red carpet than heard on the radio. So his move from stereo systems to the silver screen isn’t so much the grand, headline-making transition of a Diana Ross or a Lady Gaga as it is another element in the development of Machine Gun Kelly, legitimate artist, rather than Machine Gun Kelly, pretender and cheap provocateur.
Fortunately for MGK, here going by his real name, Colson Baker, he’s able to make the most of this transition for one simple reason: he can act. Whether he has range or not, whether he can open a big-budget tentpole or not, whether he’s the next Alec Guinness or Marlon Brando or Jack Nicholson or not – what Taurus demands of him, he delivers. It’s in the sincerity and vibrancy of his performance, alongside that of Maddie Hasson in a substantial supporting role, that this movie ultimately succeeds. For otherwise, it’s somewhat unremarkable, a portrait of an artist in public ascent but personal decline that lacks in originality and innovation but offers plenty of authenticity and atmosphere to hold one’s interest.
Baker is Cole, a rapper on the rise, preparing to embark on an ambitious tour under a perpetual haze of drug-fueled personal destruction. He throws tantrums to the press, stares into the distance while downing endless whiskeys at lunch with sponsors and staggers through late-night Los Angeles traffic in a coke-induced blackout. Through it all, he neglects his family, shuns all his responsibilities and practically abuses his assistant, Ilana (Hasson), whose commitment to cleaning up his seemingly infinite string of messes smacks more of pity than duty. He has music to make, appointments to keep and personal demons to defeat, yet all he seems able to do is to ply those demons with enough addictive substances to last him until the next blackout.
Though written by the director, Tim Sutton, this project is unmistakably Baker’s – Cole is plainly modelled after Baker himself, and the soundtrack, including the new music he’s seen working on, is taken from the MGK discography. His rockstar persona in real life is reflected in Cole’s, whether it’s an exaggeration of public expectations of his lifestyle or an amalgamative snapshot of his more reckless behavior. And Fox makes a brief, memorable appearance as the mother of his child, though in Taurus the pair are separated, with considerable and apparently justified animosity. Though even in this distinction between the real world and the movie, there’s a nod to the reported tempestuousness of their real life relationship, just one among several touches that provoke the kind of tabloid speculation that has both bolstered Baker’s fame and, to some extent, undermined his quest to be taken seriously.
So, setting aside how much respect Taurus affords its star as a musician (a decent amount, in fact), it’s at least a success in affording him legitimacy as an artist in general, due to the standard of his acting. Head hung low, face hidden beneath long, bleach-blonde hair, voice mumbled and croaky, he’s extremely convincing as a young man beholden to a deep, dangerous darkness within himself. He excels at one particularly difficult task for actors, particularly trained ones (which Baker is not): projecting a sense of distance. Even in close-up, Baker communicates a vivid sense of some psychic blockage between Cole and others around him, including the camera – he’s distant, withdrawn, sometimes almost operating in slow-motion. And then all the turmoil inside him pours forth in graphic, garrulous torrents of unconstrained emotion and Baker’s equally adept at this, appropriately wild in both energy and physicality. Hasson, then, perhaps has the tougher role, saddled with the burden of conveying various levels of constant stress and agitated bemusement with shades of sorrow shot through but she, too, is wholly up to the task, delivering a lively performance with a spontaneity and an integrity that make sense of a character one might otherwise find implausibly faithful, given all Cole puts Ilana through.
Yet it’s rarely much more than a fine, serviceable actors’ showpiece, sending its characters through a variety of strained situations whose predictability is only just about mitigated by Sutton’s keen eye and ear for mood and tone. Nothing doesn’t work about Taurus, yet nothing ever even attempts to break its own mold, instead preferring to tread a well-trodden line around its central character’s spiral. It has insight in its authenticity but it’s all insight we’ve seen and heard before, be it in film, music, literature, you name it. The self-destructive genius and their weary assistant, the drug benders, the sex workers, the dark nights of a most damaged human’s soul and, of course, the eventual attempts at redemption – none of this is new, even if it’s all expressed with genuine, impassioned earnestness by both Sutton and Baker. Does the movie do a disservice to its star, or does its star do wonders for his movie? Since Baker and Cole are posited here as, effectively, one and the same, that’s an unanswerable question. But, as an exercise in the legitimization of a particularly beleaguered and dismissed pop star, Taurus ultimately allows Machine Gun Kelly an excellent platform to do himself an excellent service.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films
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