Film

Waving its freak flag proudly, if not 100 percent redemptively, Mister Lonely is a small, fragile film that you may feel like protecting with a curved arm. In many ways, it’s the definition of snoboriffic Cannes tastemaking: a movie about lovable celebrity impersonators that has only contempt for the sheen of pop culture itself. (Behind the camera is the unpredictably glib Harmony Korine.) Here comes our hero, the Gloved One himself (Y Tu Mamá También’s bright-eyed Luna), cruising along in his surgical mask on a miniature motorcycle, toting a
plush toy monkey beside him (Bubbles?). That opening shot is ridiculous, even if scored to Bobby Vinton’s titular heartbreaker, and it sets up the film’s complicated relationship to fame: half sneer, half stare.

Michael—we never get a real name—body-rocks the Champs-Élysées for spare change. But in his more innocent moments, strategizing with his agent (an awful Leos Carax) or flirting with an equally naive Marilyn Monroe (Morton, incapable of a false performance), he comes alive as a dreamer. The two wanna-bes run off to a utopian commune of like-minded pretenders in the Scottish Highlands, and it’s here, right at this liberation, that the movie begins to pad itself out with cutesy contrivances. There’s a bossy Charlie Chaplin (Lavant) who makes everyone’s life miserable, the putting-on of a talent show (gosh, will anyone come?) and, yes, the tears of a clown. In an unrelated plot strand, missionary Werner Herzog spouts half-baked, spiritual mumbo jumbo.

You want the Korine of Gummo to lean hard into his Warholian streak of cliquish defiance, but where do these psychobabbly platitudes come from? “It doesn’t take long to die—not as long as it takes to live,” Marilyn murmurs sagely; later, Jacko seems to quit the game, saying, “The world outside is waiting for us.” Mister Lonely invites us to escape into fantasy, then seems embarrassed by its own dare.