As weird as it gets

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2015)

Ah, Frank. What an odd, quirky, charming little film, and what an odd, quirky little journey it took me on. With its wildly weird for the sake of weird style and and careless indie pop bravado, it's a movie that any misunderstood avant garde hipster musician will tell you actually "gets it." If none of this is making sense so far, Frank is a movie about an experimental rock group whose front man, the titular Frank, wears a giant plaster head at all times. It's a film whose premise promises the oddest of antics, and then subsequently delivers on that promise.
Frank is freaking weird and it loves the fact that its freaking weird. It embraces the weird and dances around frivolously with its offbeat sense of humor and colorful cast of caricatured characters. It's a film that has its own sense of style and isn't trying to be like anything that has come before it, which is something that makes Frank a hell of a lot of fun. It definitely has its own sense of humor, one that is so weird that it works beautifully. The plot, which involves chronicling this band as they lock themselves in a cabin in the woods to make the greatest album ever, is pretty straightforward. But everything about the film's humor, style, and energy is everything but straightforward. It's a totally original kind of experience.
The main character of Frank that isn't Frank is Domhnall Gleeson's Jon, a musician who finds himself playing keyboard for Frank's band, a band where he stands out as quite possibly the only sane one out of all of them. Taking the film from his perspective grounds us in the real world that is inhabited by Frank and company's frenetic and unpredictable energy. He's an outsider looking into one of the strangest experiences of his life, just as the audience is outside looking in to this weird world of Frank. Without him this whole film would just be following this eccentric group of weirdos, which would admittedly be fun, but wouldn't allow the story to have as much substance, which Frank certainly has.
But taking Gleeson's straightman character and putting him with the rest of this wacky cast makes for a great time. Michael Fassbender's performance as Frank is one of the strangest and most hilariously unique performances I've ever seen. I can only imagine the difficulties of acting without the use of your face, but Fassbender nails it. He gives the emotionless plaster head so much personality that is way too much fun to watch.
The one thing about Frank that threw me for a loop was its third act which changed drastically in tone. It was a fairly sudden jump from wacky comedy to heartfelt drama, one that breaks down the beautiful enigma that was Frank for the first two acts. It caught me off guard, but with Frank's great ending note I think it actually worked.
All in all, Frank is almost too damn quirky for its own good, but its just so much fun. For entertainment value Frank is an A+. It's a movie where you're never completely sure what you're watching and you're not sure what the point of any of the film's strangeness really is, but you're having too much fun to really care. Frank is a blast and you will be hard pressed to find anything quite like it. It's its own brand. The enigmatic Frank brand.