92 min | NR | September 17, 2021 | IFC Films
St. Vincent agrees to let her bandmate Carrie Brownstein film a documentary about her tour. The footage of her real life is too boring to use, so the documentary starts inventing a more interesting St. Vincent. Then the invention takes over.
St. Vincent plays a version of herself named St. Vincent. Carrie Brownstein plays a version of herself making a documentary about that St. Vincent. The problem they discover is that the real woman is dull on camera. She does laundry. She plays Scrabble in the tour van. So the film about authenticity becomes a film about manufacturing a persona, and the persona consumes the person who built it. Bill Benz and his two writers use the documentary frame to ask what is left of an artist once the artist becomes a brand.
St. Vincent plays Self as two people fighting for the same body. One is Annie Clark, polite and ordinary and protective of her privacy. The other is St. Vincent, the stage construction who flirts, dominates, and performs intimacy on command. Clark makes the seam between them visible and then erases it. Carrie Brownstein plays Self as the director who keeps pushing for something realer and gets exactly that, to her horror. Dakota Johnson appears as Self in a hotel sequence that weaponizes celebrity sexuality and lets St. Vincent perform a version of desire built entirely for the lens.
Bill Benz directs from a script by Brownstein and Clark, and he stages the persona takeover as a slow corruption of the documentary form itself. The film opens looking like handheld tour footage and gradually slides into saturated, theatrical lighting as St. Vincent the character wins. The concert sequences are shot with hard color and deliberate artifice that mark the exact moment the movie stops trusting its own cameras. Benz lets the frame curdle from observation into spectacle. The editing keeps cutting back to a limo driver and a green room as anchors of reality, and each return feels less real than the last.
The film has a sharp idea and the discipline to commit to its central joke. The trouble is that the joke arrives early and the movie keeps restating it rather than deepening it. Each new layer of fakery confirms the thesis instead of complicating it, and the satire of celebrity persona starts to circle. What saves the back half is the chemistry between Clark and Brownstein, two collaborators who clearly trust each other enough to film their friendship collapsing into a bit. The Nowhere Inn knows exactly what it wants to say about performing a self for an audience. It says it well, and then it says it again.