95 min | R | May 7, 2021 | IFC Films
A washed-out drifter with a hatred of phones becomes the internet’s favorite anti-influencer. The fame eats him alive. Mainstream wants to warn you about a culture it does not actually understand.
Frankie shoots video on her phone and posts it to nowhere. Then she finds Link, a charismatic drifter who rants against screens and influencers and the rot of online attention. She films him, the videos go viral, and the anti-influencer becomes an influencer. Gia Coppola’s film presents itself as a satire of viral fame and the platforms that manufacture it. It mistakes naming the problem for saying something about it.
Andrew Garfield plays Link with total commitment and no governor. He shrieks, he mugs, he strips down in public and dances, and the performance is a sustained act of energy in search of a character. Maya Hawke plays Frankie as the watchful enabler who builds the monster and then recoils from it. Nat Wolff plays Jake, the writer who loves Frankie and sees through Link before she does. Jason Schwartzman plays Mark Schwartz, the producer who packages the chaos for money. The actors work hard. The script gives them slogans instead of people.
Coppola directs from a screenplay she wrote with Tom Stuart, and the film keeps interrupting its own images with animated overlays. Cartoon dollar signs, emoji, and floating text crowd the frame whenever Link performs. The device is meant to render the texture of online life and it instead flattens every scene into a graphic about online life. The look is bright and candy-colored, and the cutting chases the same hyperactive rhythm as its subject. The form imitates the disease without ever diagnosing it.
This is a film that scolds a culture it cannot describe. Its targets are obvious and its insights are the ones the audience walked in with. Fame corrupts. Screens isolate. Selling out is bad. Coppola assembles a committed cast and a frantic surface around a thesis that never advances past the bumper sticker.