There might well be something inherent in the warped, pressurized, attention-surplus lifestyle of a pop star that steers you toward embarking on something like The Nowhere Inn. You combine rocket-fuel egophilia with ironic hyper-awareness, and the non-stop need to up your brand, and a movie could result-- a movie not even your fans know what to do with. The wazoo we're exploring here belongs to music artist St. Vincent, who is starring as herself, in a winking blast of narcissism wrapped in satirical anti-narcissism and vice-versa, and thus tapping into deep layers of disingenuousness.

Bone-hard cynicism is the default mode, for the real? Annie Clark, and for us. Co-written and co-produced by Clark and her best friend? Carrie Brownstein ? who also stars as herself the film begins in familiar reality show/promo mode, within a documentary they're ostensibly making about St. V's life, and a mockumentary about the process. Sisterly and earnest at first, Clark and Brownstein talk about stripping away the layers, until a dilemma is faced: Clark's life isn't interesting enough to fill out a film. (Which could be true or not?)

Tiptoeing toward Black Swan and Pink Floyd The Wall, the film hints at emotional fissure, but glibly, treating Clark's insistent modesty as a kind of inside joke. A prime moment occurs while shooting a magazine interview, when the pushy journalist (Rya Kihlstedt) gets a Dear Jane break-up text from her girlfriend, and then insists Clarke record a message begging for a second chance. Why did you let her do that, Brownstein asks? I didn't want her to be mad at me!? Clark whines.


Things change and fall apart: much to Brownstein's chagrin, Clark rectifies the film's formlessness by juicing things up (including on-camera romance with Dakota Johnson, as herself). She becomes St. Vincent, a pampered, high-handed, controlling star. Because pop stardom is fascist isn't it? her audience adopts her black bob, and even Brownstein's made to wear the wig. Oddly, the more ironic and inventive the film gets, the more it seems like a pure-bred vanity project. Feints toward emotional breakdown (including lots of fuzzy subjective camerawork) are not to be taken seriously, and therefore land with a plop.

Directed without surprises by Portlandia vet Bill Benz, it's a film that conjures the ghosts of other, better films the bullying portrait of annoying fandom even recalls Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, a corollary any semi-autobio showbiz figure should work hard to avoid. Brady Corbet's rather amazing Vox Lux also pops to mind, treading the same pop-crisis floorboards with many times the conviction.

Brownstein is the TV-seasoned vet here, even if her persona is merely shrugging bafflement, but Clark, to her credit, is something else: transfixing, glamorous, giga-cool, and ferociously manipulative, whether she's playing little-old-me or megastar ice queen. The news in 2019 that longtime Sleater-Kinney member Janet Weiss jumped ship after St. Vincent came on as the group's new producer seems clearer now you can easily envision the oxygen getting hoovered out of the studio in a flash.

It'd be a mistake to confuse The Nowhere Inn as anything profound -- Clark clearly isn't making a statement about being a mid-tier pop star; she's just riffing on the navel-gaze music doc genre and on our expectations of how ironic that riffing can get. Maybe it should've been just? a music documentary, or a concert film, given St. Vincent's flashy stage show. But that would mean being honest about vanity if not anything else.