Film reviews: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Frankenstein, and Blue Moon
A rock star on the rise turns inward, a stressed mother begins to unravel, and more
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Directed by Scott Cooper (PG-13)
★★
The new Bruce Springsteen movie “isn’t just another assembly-line biopic—and that’s a blessing,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But while the brief chapter of the rock star’s life that the film focuses on is “as good as any,” it’s also “a fairly dull story.” In the early 1980s, as Springsteen reached his early 30s, he was just a short step away from megastardom when he instead began recording the dark, radically stripped-down tracks that became the album Nebraska. We see him return home to New Jersey—but “looking for what exactly?” You have to go in already treasuring the 1982 album to find the story fully rewarding.
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Jeremy Allen White, in the lead role, “manages to create an ineffably convincing Springsteen,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. He does the trick by playing the singer as a man who fears he’s a fraud. But the movie isn’t confident enough to let the actor’s work convey Springsteen’s emotions. It throws in “ultra-broad” flashbacks to Springsteen’s boyhood clashes with a violent father and over-dramatizes the challenges of persuading the artist’s label to package and release his raw Nebraska tapes.
But after a first act that’s “overburdened with clichés,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com, the movie “begins to open up, becoming a soulful and meditative character study,” and in the final third, Springsteen’s depression moves to the forefront and “does so with a wallop.” Suddenly, he’s a relatably flawed and damaged human, “as raw and as frank as the characters in his songs.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Directed by Mary Bronstein (R)
★★★
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“Can a film succeed too wildly in accomplishing what it sets out to do?” asked Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Mary Bronstein’s new pitch-black comedy about motherhood as a lonely, relentless crisis is exhausting and anxiety-inducing, and yet Rose Byrne’s “vivid, impassioned performance” makes the frazzled protagonist both sympathetic and unforgettable. Byrne plays Linda, a mom and therapist whose young daughter requires a feeding tube and constant attention, and as if it’s not bad enough that her scolding husband is never around to help, their apartment ceiling soon collapses in a flood that forces Linda and her daughter to relocate to a motel.
That’s just the beginning of Linda’s downward spiral, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, because Bronstein’s movie is “a portrait of modern motherhood as a nonstop panic attack.” Linda must also contend with a hostile pediatrician, a vicious hamster, unstable clients, and a contemptuous therapist of her own (played by a deadpan Conan O’Brien). All the while, Byrne delivers such an “exquisitely raw” performance that, “if you had any decency, you’d look away.”
The rapper A$AP Rocky, who plays the motel’s easygoing super, allows us to see Linda as more than a bundle of shot nerves, said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. Even so, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You “turns a mother’s anxiety into an almost supernatural force.” At a certain point, and not unhappily, “I realized I was watching a horror movie.”
Frankenstein
Directed by Guillermo del Toro (R)
★★★
Though there was “no discernible need for a new Frankenstein,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, Guillermo del Toro’s “visually opulent” and “emotionally rich” adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel easily justifies its existence. “A tortured saga of fathers and sons, hubris and humility,” the Netflix film, which is briefly appearing in theaters before its Nov. 7 release for home viewing, casts Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and an “outstanding” Jacob Elordi as the monster the mad scientist creates from the stray parts of battlefield cadavers.
Until the creature stirs, however, much of this handsome film “feels busy but weirdly lifeless,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Del Toro seems to want his Dr. Frankenstein to appear damaged and less than fully human, which sets the stage for the cruel way he treats his creation. Fortunately, once the monster is zapped to life, “Elordi makes the creature’s awakening, his growing curiosity and hurt, feel fresh, vital, new.” As hurt turns to rage, del Toro executes his own vision with the obsessiveness of a madman. And really, “that’s the only way anyone should make a movie of Frankenstein.”
Blue Moon
Directed by Richard Linklater (R)
★★★
Richard Linklater’s latest movie “would make a fantastic play,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. But don’t wait for the stage version, because Ethan Hawke is “transfixing” in the role of lyricist Lorenz Hart, and the film’s “stunningly smart” screenplay brilliantly imagines the night in 1943 when Hart realized his career was over. He has just walked out on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the new musical packed with songs that his longtime partner, Richard Rodgers, wrote with a new wordsmith. Hart settles onto a barstool, and as he awaits the cast’s postshow arrival, he “hurls insults, tells outrageous tales, hits on anyone with legs,” turning the night into a drunken, wrenching, “intellectually intoxicating” ride.
Hart was short, balding, and gay, and the efforts made to change Hawke’s appearance “can be a little distracting,” said Jake Coyle in the Associated Press. Still, “the actor has simply never been better.” His Hart proves to be “extraordinarily good company,” and though he has an audience of only a few, that few includes Bobby Cannavale and Margaret Qualley, and “they’re a fine crew.”