Hide and Seek

Members of the band: Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Fassbender, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Illustration by Victor Melamed

Can the power of a star be sensed without being observed? Claude Rains suggested as much eighty years ago, in “The Invisible Man,” where his features were swathed in bandages, and Michael Fassbender now does the same in “Frank.” For most of the film, in which he plays the title character, his head is completely covered by another head—a great painted pumpkin of papier-mâché, with staring eyes and a gently gaping mouth. He wears it everywhere, even in the shower. Nobody knows why. The people around Frank accept the head, not as an excrescence or a badge of style but as part of his nature, and as the source of his disorienting charm. If he worked in a law firm, the head might be a stumbling block, but Frank is the lead singer in a rock band, so it’s O.K.

The band is called soronprfbs, which, being stubbornly unpronounceable, is unlikely to bring in new fans. That suits the band just fine, even if it locks the members into penury. The pursuit of fame means treachery and compromise to people like Frank; Don (Scoot McNairy), the manager; and Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who plays the theremin and dresses like Holly Golightly’s very angry sister. All of which is confounding to an upstart like Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), who joins soronprfbs on keyboard after the band’s usual player tries to drown himself in a cold gray English sea. Jon passes the audition, which consists of being asked, “You play C, F, and G?,” and finds himself spirited off to Ireland, in the back of a van, to cohabit for months with soronprfbs in a secluded house beside a lake, working on an album that almost no one will want to hear. Cheerfully defying the void of his own talent, Jon dreams of writing popular hits. He uses an inheritance to fund the band, tweets news of its progress, and chivvies it toward the outside world. He wants the band to be liked, of all things. The bickering and the indecision that ensue are an accurate guide to the ambitions of the movie itself: Does “Frank” want to be a crowd-pleaser, or is it happy to stay difficult and odd, and let the crowd go hang?

There was once a real Frank, of sorts, with a comparable head. He was a persona created by a British comedian and musician named Chris Sievey; a friend and collaborator, Jon Ronson, wrote a book about Sievey and has co-written the script for the film, with Peter Straughan. Together with the director, Lenny Abrahamson, they proceed on the assumption that too much Frank, uninterrupted, would burst the bounds of the movie, and that much of his mystery would leak away. They cleave, in other words, to what I call the Backbeat Principle: if your main man is shiningly glamorous or markedly eccentric, don’t plant him in full view, but approach him through the prism of another character—preferably a duller one, so as not to steal the glow. Thus, in “Backbeat,” Iain Softley’s 1994 film about the early Beatles, John Lennon was refracted through the gaze of Stuart Sutcliffe. Much earlier, there was Charles Ryder, in “Brideshead Revisited,” and Nick Carraway, in “The Great Gatsby,” both of them reliably spellbound narrators. Even there, however, in the hands of masterly authors, one felt a twinge of doubt. What did Sebastian Flyte, a lord and a dandy, see and admire in the mousy, middle-class Charles? Would Gatsby really have lavished such companionship on a square like Nick, if it weren’t for the link to Daisy? And so it is with “Frank,” which badly needs Jon to stick around and tell the tale, but which leaves you wondering why on earth a pack of tortured, experimental hipsters would hire a full-blown dork.

The final third of the movie takes a fresh turn, westward and downward. The band members, against their instincts, are persuaded by Jon to try their luck at South by Southwest, in Austin. I was praying for a scene in which Frank is instructed by airport security to remove his head and place it on the conveyor belt to be scanned, but Abrahamson, for some reason, skips that particular hurdle. In any case, disaster enough awaits soronprfbs, and the film’s dive into gloom has been greeted, in some quarters, with dismay. I have to disagree. The first hour of “Frank” was in danger of becoming merely cultish and kooky, and so the decision to reveal Frank not as a poser but as a genuinely blasted soul, his mind veering between doldrum and storm, strikes me as honest and affecting. It also reveals him without his false head, which was, we now realize, less a mask than a fragile fortress against a world that he, and the contents of his actual head, couldn’t handle. Best of all, we get to witness Fassbender at full tilt—to revel in that gaunt, El Greco mug of his, which, for all its handsomeness, betrays no sunny side, whether here or amid the shenanigans of “X-Men.” In the new film, he sings throughout, signing off in a half-deserted bar with a rendition of “I Love You All,” in his lonely drone. Just when “Frank” threatens to drift away, Fassbender anchors it, reminding us that for some folk, in the music business as elsewhere, the creative act is more of a trial than a flight. There is method in his sadness.

The new Ira Sachs movie, “Love Is Strange,” begins where many stories used to end, on a wedding day. There are no bells, but we get an open-air ceremony, a few speeches, a sing-along around a piano, and a deep, smacking kiss between groom and groom. Ben (John Lithgow), a painter, and his British partner, George (Alfred Molina), have been together for decades. Now they set the seal on their affection.

That simple gesture, however, has repercussions. George is the music director at a Catholic church in Manhattan, where his sexuality has never been a secret; by marrying, though, he falls foul of diocesan rules and loses his job. The lack of fuss that he makes, when faced with dismissal, is our first clue to the shading of his character and to the temper of Sachs’s film. We prepare ourselves for outrage, and it never comes. Instead, as George accepts his fate, his features and his heavy frame subside into a doleful, if courteous, despair. Invited by the priest to join him in prayer, George declines: “I think I’d like to pray on my own.”

To an extent, all this is the mark of Molina, perhaps the leading melancholic of our age. Even as the villain of “Spider-Man 2,” armed with killer tentacles, he managed to inject a dose of the rueful. But the snapping ferocity that is also his to command—as anyone who saw him onstage, as Mark Rothko, in “Red,” can testify—is hushed here, and his only outburst, in the whole movie, is a sudden tempest of tears, as he shuffles through the door, on a rainy night, into the arms of Ben. We could be watching a small boy, plump and bullied, seeking a parent’s embrace. Such sorrow makes an ideal foil for Lithgow, who is blessed with more natural upswing, in his demeanor and in the rising curve of his voice; he can flip from petulant to avuncular in a heartbeat. They make a lovely couple.

“Love Is Strange,” however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance. In the dramatizing of gay rights, somebody needed to include the right of same-sex partners to be as bogged down in moping and pettiness as anyone else, and Sachs has shouldered the task. He has made things easy for himself, you could argue, by setting the story in a state and a town where two guys getting hitched is no big deal, but, by way of compensation, choosing New York City does provide him with a source of genuine anguish: not sex (we see a quick cuddle on the lower deck of a bunk bed, and that’s it); not religion (George affirms his faith once, then never refers to it again); but real estate. The loss of one income forces the newlyweds to give up their place and, unable to afford an apartment big enough for both of them, find separate refuges. And the moral is: Those whom God has joined together let rents and co-op boards put asunder.

So George moves in with friends downstairs—a pair of gay cops—sleeps on their couch, and tries not to mind the rumpus of their gregarious lives. Ben, meanwhile, goes to the Brooklyn home of his nephew Elliot (Darren Burrows), who struck me as increasingly creepy; Elliot’s wife, Kate (Marisa Tomei); and their teen-age son, Joey (Charlie Tahan). Tomei’s performance is, as usual, alert and unvain, and there is a fine scene in which Kate—a novelist by trade, presumably one of dozens living on her street—tries and fails to write while Ben peppers her with specks of annoying conversation. For his part, Ben goes up to the roof to paint, looking for all the world like Matisse, with his white beard, spectacles, and scruffy summer hat. There are tranquil shots of the city as it breathes the afternoon light, yet I felt like shaking him and saying: Haven’t you heard about the country? It’s calmer and cheaper, with even better light. So why stay here, torn from your beloved, when you could pack up your easel, take his hand, and go? ♦