MISTER LONELY

MISTER LONELY follows a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator living in Paris who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and follows her to a commune in the Scottish Highlands. There, a strange community of celebrity doubles lives together: Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, the Pope, Abraham Lincoln, Little Red Riding Hood and others, all trying to build a life from borrowed identities.

Harmony Korine makes this sound like a joke, then refuses to treat it as one. The film is tender, odd, damaged and frequently absurd, but never cruel toward its characters. These people aren’t simply pretending to be famous. They’re using performance as shelter, trying to find belonging through icons larger than themselves.

When MISTER LONELY premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2007, it confused plenty of viewers expecting the confrontational chaos of Korine’s earlier work. Instead, he made something stranger and softer: a film about imitation, loneliness, celebrity worship and the emotional cost of turning yourself into someone else.

For a Marilyn tribute, that feels right. Monroe became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. MISTER LONELY asks what happens to the people still living in the glow of that image, long after the person herself is gone.