Being an independent filmmaker makes My Movie Starring Paul Dano a little harder for me to review than most movies. Not because I feel obligated to go easy on it. If anything, it’s the opposite. I know these people.
I’ve met versions of them on sets, at film festivals, in Facebook groups and during conversations that probably should have ended two hours earlier. I’ve been one of them. Independent filmmaking requires a certain amount of delusion. You almost have to convince yourself that the movie can be made before there’s any rational evidence that it can.
Joe Bartone’s My Movie Starring Paul Dano understands that very well. Maybe too well.
The mockumentary follows Herman Rumowicz, played by Christopher Michael Jones, an aspiring filmmaker who becomes convinced that Paul Dano visited him in a dream and essentially commissioned him to make his science-fiction opus, Bear Naked Amazonians from Mars. If Herman gets the movie made on time, it will somehow conquer South by Southwest and make him a celebrity. Herman treats the dream less like a dream than a legally binding agreement and starts assembling a movie around a star who has no idea any of this is happening.
Almost immediately, I thought about Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie, which followed Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt desperately trying to finish Coven. That isn’t an accusation that Bartone copied it. He has talked publicly about No Wave filmmaking and the determination of someone like Ed Wood as influences. Still, the resemblance is difficult for me to ignore.
Both films understand something funny, sad and strangely admirable about a filmmaker who hasn’t been dealt all the right cards. Maybe the talent isn’t completely there. The money definitely isn’t there. The connections aren’t there. Reality appears to be giving the guy every possible indication that he should quit.
He keeps going anyway.
That is independent filmmaking in a nutshell, and sometimes it’s also the thing that can destroy you.
The important difference is that American Movie doesn’t have to exaggerate Mark Borchardt. He is a real person, so the comedy and sadness can coexist without the documentary needing to underline either one. My Movie Starring Paul Dano has to manufacture Herman, and too often it pushes his delusion beyond the point where I believe him as an actual person.
I understand why. This is a farce. Herman isn’t simply optimistic. He exists in an alternate reality where celebrity commitments arrive in dreams and a catastrophically underfunded movie is always one lucky break away from legitimacy.
But there came a point when I stopped thinking, “I’ve met this filmmaker,” and started thinking, “Nobody could actually function like this.”
That’s where the movie began losing me, which is frustrating because I genuinely like the soul of the thing.
I also love its scrappy visual personality. There’s an old Canon XL-series 3CCD camcorder floating around this world that immediately hit some primitive filmmaking part of my brain. The rough video aesthetic fits a story about people throwing themselves into a production with more enthusiasm than resources. I don’t mean that it looks polished or conventionally beautiful. It looks handmade, and for this movie that’s more interesting.
The mockumentary approach is also the right language for the material. Keeping a documentary camera around while Herman builds his disaster lets Bartone look at filmmaking not as the romantic thing people imagine, but as the bizarre administrative nightmare it actually becomes. Money, casting, personalities, favors, rewrites, equipment, actors and people asking perfectly reasonable questions you were hoping nobody would ask.
One audition moment, when a woman simply asks, “Is this SAG?”, got the biggest laugh out of me.
I’ve been there.
Not that exact situation, but every microbudget filmmaker recognizes that feeling. Somebody asks one completely normal professional question and suddenly the fragile legitimacy of your entire production is hanging in the air.
There are moments like this where Bartone clearly knows the world he’s making fun of. Unfortunately, recognizing that world and making the comedy consistently work are two different things.
The performances became one of my biggest problems with the movie. There are actors playing bad actors inside a movie about bad filmmaking, so some awkwardness is obviously intentional. The problem is that I frequently couldn’t figure out where the intentionally bad performance ended and an actually weak performance began.
That’s a dangerous line for this kind of movie.
If I’m watching somebody bomb an audition and the character is supposed to be terrible, great. The joke works. But when I’m watching the people around that character and starting to question whether their performances are supposed to be bad too, the joke collapses.
Several performances simply didn’t work for me, even within the heightened reality Bartone is going for.
The movie also keeps returning to essentially the same comic premise. Herman is delusional. The production is doomed. Everyone around him is some combination of eccentric, incompetent, desperate or opportunistic. Those ingredients can be funny, but eventually you’ve established the point and escalation becomes difficult.
That was my problem with a lot of the movie. It keeps explaining a joke I already understood.
Other critics have been considerably warmer toward the chaos than I was, although even positive reviews have acknowledged gags that don’t land and scenes that hang around longer than necessary. For me, those problems aren’t minor rough edges. Eventually they overwhelm what I like about the movie.
Then there’s Uncle Pio, who becomes involved in financing Herman’s production. That made the American Movie connection even harder for me to shake. Borchardt famously turned to his elderly Uncle Bill for financial help. Here we again have a hapless older relative mixed up in the finances of an almost certainly doomed independent movie.
Maybe that similarity wouldn’t bother me so much if the rest of the film weren’t already putting me in that headspace, but once I saw it I couldn’t really unsee it.
And this is where writing the review gets uncomfortable for me.
I know how hard it is to make an independent movie.
I know what it means to ask people for favors, find locations, solve problems with money you don’t have, convince people your project is worth their time and somehow drag the thing through production and post.
Bartone did that.
The movie exists, and there is real affection for filmmaking inside it. I don’t question the commitment for a second. Bartone wrote, directed, produced and composed for the film, and he has said the movie went from the beginning of writing through the final day of principal photography in only 18 weeks and two days, followed by approximately 18 months of editing, graphics and visual-effects work.
That’s an accomplishment.
It also can’t be the final measurement of whether a movie works.
Ironically, that may be one of the truest ideas buried inside My Movie Starring Paul Dano.
You can love movies more than anybody. You can refuse to quit. You can convince your friends to help, scrape together the money, find locations, get the camera rolling and somehow finish the damn thing.
And the movie can still be bad.
For me, My Movie Starring Paul Dano is.
That’s harder for me to write about a movie like this than it would be about some anonymous $100 million studio disaster because I understand the impulse behind it. I understand needing to make the thing. I understand convincing yourself the problems can be solved because, frankly, sometimes that delusion is the only reason an independent movie gets finished at all.
There are genuinely funny observations here. There’s a rough visual personality I responded to. There’s an idea about artistic delusion that gets uncomfortably close to something I think every independent filmmaker has to recognize in themselves.
I just wish the movie trusted that truth more.
Herman didn’t need to be pushed this far into absurdity for me to recognize him.
Independent filmmakers are already ridiculous enough.
I should know.
3.9/10
Critical Screening was provided a screener of My Movie Starring Paul Dano for review purposes.