It is almost inevitable that European auteurs develop an overweening desire to make movies in the US, if only just once. Some get the chance and some, like Fassbinder and Almódovar, do not. Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of El Divo and The Family Friend, had Sean Penn to help him, and comes up with a movie that’s certainly surprising but a little on the determinedly eccentric side.
Penn plays Cheyenne, a retired rock star with a goth hairdo, eyeliner and a squeaky voice, who progresses from Dublin to the US, where his estranged father, a Holocaust survivor, has just died. Obsessed with discovering his father’s Nazi tormentor, Cheyenne progresses across America to kill him.
The film is part road movie, part oddball thriller and you have to say that Penn makes Cheyenne into a flawed hero you can’t easily forget — a childlike veteran of the rock scene who finds the real world puzzling — while Sorrentino looks at America with the fresh eyes that Europeans often give that country. There are also nice cameos from Harry Dean Stanton, veteran of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and David Byrne, who wrote the music, as himself.
But even though it has been re-edited since it was shown at Cannes, the film still lacks a coherent screenplay and Frances McDormand is entirely wasted as his wife. It doesn’t really work but it’s very watchable all the same.
