The Nowhere Inn Review
The Nowhere Inn, Bill Benz’s mockumentary written by and starring Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein, is a meta take on fame and music documentaries in 2020 — a Portlandia meets Mulholland drive romp through the life Clark and her alter-ego, St Vincent. The film asks us what we want from our popstars, besides their music, in an age of seemingly endless transparency and what happens when we look for the person behind the mask. Whether the filmmakers answer the questions they raise is up for debate, but I’m not sure they need to, as the performances from Brownstein and Clark are compelling enough to draw us into the world they have created.
The Portlandia comparisons go beyond just Brownstein’s involvement, Benz’s having worked on the show too, and the two of them successfully bring the absurdist humour the show is known for to The Nowhere Inn. However, Clark is very much the Lynchian element. The film revolves around a series of ominous post-mortem Behind the Music style talking-head interviews with Clark. She explains her motivations for making a documentary and how excited she was to have her best friend at the helm. It all begins innocently enough as Clark thoughtfully ponders, ‘I guess I just wanted for people to know who I really am,’ over plaintive piano music and your typical montage of a band on the road — a movie that VH1 would have been proud of! If it wasn’t for the fact that we had first encountered Clark, Thomas Newton-like, hurtling through the Californian desert in a white limo, being given the third degree by the mysterious driver about who she is, I might have thought this film might have been just a one-trick pony.
As Brownstein quickly finds out, life on the road really isn’t that interesting, and Clark and her band aren’t cliches of rock and roll excess like the Rolling Stones of Robert Frank’s Cock Sucker Blues. Instead of orgies Clark and her bandmates are all double-double word scores and shopping for radishes. Brownstein continues looking, probing more behind the scenes, interviewing Clark’s bandmates but to no avail. Brownstein tells Clark that the disparity between the scrabble-playing, radish-eating Clark of the road and her stage incarnation is too ‘jarring’ — can’t she be more St. Vincent all of the time for the benefit of the movie? This doesn’t get off to the best of starts, and Clark, not being admitted to her own soundcheck and then overhearing something she shouldn’t, forces her to go full St. Vincent.
The Nowhere Inn has a lot of fun with this idea. We watch Clark riff on what it is to be a diva to hilarious results. She has a moody cigarette before a gig, asks Brownstein to announce her entry after the gig, reaching its pinnacle when St. Vincent asks Brownstein to film a sex scene with her and her girlfriend, played by Dakota Johnson. Very much like the bad Cooper of Lynch’s Twin Peaks, this is the id beginning to be unleashed.
The Nowhere Inn could easily disappear up its own ass if it wasn’t as funny as it is and wasn’t anchored by a damn fine performance from Clark. However, once the cat is out of the bag, it is well and truly out of the bag, and the film loses some of the bite it had for the first couple of acts. I wanted more of the live concert footage that is scattered throughout the film. Clark is electric on stage, and the sheer atmosphere and craft behind the performances outshone the final third of the movie for me —this is what I want to see, I kept thinking to myself, and if it wasn’t for Clark’s amusing origin story back in Texas, I might not have forgiven them. It’s no secret that Clark is a private person, and rightly so. She has every right to control the narrative, as her character says in the movie. Still, maybe the genuinely transgressive thing would be to make an actual documentary and let us decide what is interesting. Having said that, this is a well-crafted movie and an entertaining ride that even people not familiar with St. Vincent should enjoy.