Oh, what a wonderful surprise Frank is. On the surface it seems to be a wacky comedy about a nutjob band leader wearing a giant fake head at all times. What could have been a throwaway gag stretched to feature film length becomes a small cinematic miracle.
The film stars Domhnall Gleeson as Jon. He is an office drone who dreams to make it big as a musician despite his inability to finish writing songs. One day a band with an unpronounceable name, led by the mysterious Frank, comes to his town to play and offers Jon a chance to join the gig after their keyboarder tries to drown himself. Jon jumps at the chance and is soon more than knee-deep into weird recording sessions in the middle of nowhere in Ireland, dealing with tense band relations, their road to fame and the titular Frank, played with gusto by Michael Fassbender.
Frank is quite the character. As said before, his trademark is that he always wears a giant fake head, even (as we discover in one scene) in the shower. But apart from that he is also a brilliant, off-kilter musician. This marks him as the complete counterpoint to our protagonist Jon and reveals one of the key themes this film cleverly depicts: Identity. Jon is a wannabe musician who hasn't found his own voice yet, he knows that he doesn't want to spend his life in an office job but still lacks his own musical identity. Clara, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, has a short temper and hides herself and her identity behind a wall of cool aloofness and sudden explosions of anger. Band manager Don, played by Scoot McNairy, idolizes Frank for his talent to such an extent that he sheds his own identity and aspires to be like him. Frank on the other hand is confident, knows what he wants and what he is good at, he is aware of his own identity and knows who he is, even though he needs the head to let his persona roam free.
Even the main conflict of the film can be traced back to identity issues. Jon, in an attempt to appeal to the masses, avidly tweets about the band's progress (the movie goes the extra mile by writing out the tweets including hashtags, often with hilarious results), blogs about his experience and uploads videos of their recording sessions to YouTube. He is creating a new identity for the band, filtered through his own eyes. Problems arise when they are booked for a gig at South By Southwest, and the band suddenly has to deal with newly found fame, all based on something none of them was aware of and none of them embraces in the same way Jon does.
If all of that sounds a little bit heavy for you, don't worry, one of Frank's strengths is how seamlessly it incorporates bigger themes into its enjoyable plot. And there is a lot to enjoy. Jon's obsession with social media is a great satriric bit that hits home for anyone who's ever held a smartphone in his hands. The band's antics are never overplayed, we always get the sense that behind their unusual music and odd behavior are real people. And, of course, there's the main attraction of the movie, Michael Fassbender as Frank. In the past couple of years Fassbender has quickly risen to stardom, and not for nothing. Whether it's in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, any of the Steve McQueen movies, or even in something as deeply flawed as Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Fassbender always delivers. Here he goes one step further and proves what an acting heavyweight he is: robbed of his facial expressions behind the fake head he is still charismatic, fascinating and oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny.
Without going into any details, the third act of the movie performs the films greatest trick and successfully shifts the tone away from musical comedy to something way more profound. I have to physically keep myself from giving away the magical final scene, something of such sad beauty and cinematic elegance that it kept me thinking about it for days on end. It is one of the most satisfying conclusions to a movie I've seen in quite a while. That is no small feat, but when all is said and done, one cannot deny that Frank is one of the finest (and sadly most underappreciated) movies of 2014.
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