Frank (2014)

Frank is a 2014 film about a man who wears a large papier-mâché head and plays in a band that nobody likes, and it approaches this material with a straight face, which is the correct approach. The cast is white, the setting is a remote Irish cabin, and the plot concerns a group of difficult people making unlistenable music while a newcomer quietly uploads their sessions to the internet. Nobody in the film remarks on the demographics, and the film does not invite them to. There is a French guitarist and a female drummer, and that is the extent of the diversification on offer. The film seems content to let this be a story about specific people, which is a modest virtue and no longer a common one.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's Clara is the most forceful presence in the film. She is aggressive, possessive, and entirely self-possessed, and she stabs a man in the leg because she said she would. The film grants her this without turning her into a thesis statement, which is either a missed opportunity or a sign of restraint, depending on the viewer's appetite. Her suspicion of Jon's marketing instincts, and his determination to package the band for South by Southwest and the internet, gives the film a quiet friction between art and commerce. It is not an economic argument. It is a disagreement between people in a van.

The film's real interest is Frank's illness, and here it does something worth respecting. When Jon proposes that suffering made Frank brilliant, Frank's parents correct him flatly: the talent was always there, and the illness has held him back. That single scene dismantles a durable and unhelpful myth. The film observes this without a speech, without a lesson, and without asking for applause. It is melancholy, strange, and largely content to sit with its characters. Few films of its era showed such discipline.