In the Spotlight: MAINSTREAM, THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE, and TICK, TICK...BOOM!

A fluke of pandemic scheduling found Andrew Garfield starring this year in a loose accidental trilogy of movies about ambitious people for whom others’ perceptions of them becomes their reality. In Gia Coppola’s Mainstream, he’s a social media influencer on the rise. In Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, he’s a televangelist in over his head. And in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s filmmaking debut adapting Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM!, he’s a struggling young musical playwright hoping to finally get a break on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. Garfield appears to be working out ideas of stardom and success, artistry, ambition and attention, and these films give him different notes to play and conclusions to draw. It’s fitting for a supremely talented actor looking to find the best avenues for his atypical charisma.

His career so far has been one of the attractive young man who gets stuck between character actor and matinee idol. Either way, he’s always one to watch, from artful ease in the likes of The Social Network, Silence, and Never Let Me Go, where his stubborn wet-eyed self-seriousness forms a moral backbone, to shouldering Mark Webb’s underrated Spider-Mans with a loose-limbed moodiness that sets him apart from Maguire’s sturdy earnestness and Holland’s jumpy excitement. Stuff like the flat-footed war movie Hacksaw Ridge strand him between those modes, while the loopy pop conspiracy Under the Silver Lake tapped into a wilder streak that springs from a fount of wiry, wound-up interior intensity. The through line is clear: Garfield loves to perform. No wonder he’s been drawn lately to this material that interrogates that impulse, asks what people get out of that transaction, and sees all too clearly how it’ll hollow someone out if they aren’t prepared, just as surely as it’ll be a lingering frustration to never make it there to begin with.

Mainstream is an underwritten modern Network that noodles around Big Ideas about How We Stream Now without ever quite getting to a point. Somehow Gia Coppola, in her follow-up to her level intimate teen drama Palo Alto, is content to swirl up a storm of ideas and moods and leave it at that. Garfield plays a free range prankster whose antics catch on through the help of a bartender with a crush on him (Maya Hawke), and eventually the two get hooked up with a promoter (Jason Schwartzman) who’ll fake their way to the top of the viral charts and all the promoted content that implies. Of course it spirals out of control, fame going to the head, power corrupting, and underlying mental problems compounded, as the feedback loop between audience and star grows precariously thin. But even if the general spirit of the thing has a bleeding-edge bite, the scenarios it concocts are never convincing enough to underpin any serious social satire, from an interview show that literally puts its clownish lead between Johnny Knoxville and Logan Paul to some kind of YouTube gameshow—called “Your Phone or Your Dignity,” natch—that looks like something Paddy Chayefsky might’ve put in a first draft. It’s all so much glitter and flailing, but Garfield’s wild-eyed gesticulation sells that dead-eyed striving you see creep into these wannabe pseudo-celebs from time to time. It ends with everyone involved worse off in some way, and a towering close-up of Garfield grinning like a maniac while he’s applauded, as if to say, that’s showbiz, folks.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a more believable look at this kind of boom and bust celebrity. The film is based on the true story of televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, played here with sunny surface cheerfulness and an undertow of sadness by Jessica Chastain and Garfield. They inhabit them with a cheery artifice and cheek fillers. The result is a serious character study with a slight satiric streak as it watches their scrappy rise and eventual entanglement with evangelical corruption that brings them down as scapegoats while letting the worse above them off free. Showalter, a long-time comedy pro, views his central figures with sympathy and skepticism, which sometimes softens the edges and holds them at a slight remove. The style, too, is a soft and pillowy look, a critique cushioned in unlikely blurred affection. 

 His film cares about them to a point, but doesn’t quite know how seriously to take their early intentions to spread the word of God. The couple starts young and passionate, speak softly and earnestly about their missionary fervor as they meet in Bible college and, quickly married, set out on a touring puppet show that catches the attention of Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his burgeoning Christian television network. It’s clear they like the spotlight and the trappings of fame as their show grows into a media empire. But the movie also sees the poignancy between the distance between who they want to be and who they actually are, the blindness in their conflation of their desires and the Lord’s. Garfield, especially, leans into the sleaze that can ooze in around the edges of such an ego. Ultimately the movie enjoys the silliness of Christian kitsch surrounding them—the outlandish 80’s hair and makeup mixed with reverential semi-country ballads that are sticky as hell—while allowing for the weight of semi-secret struggles within the community—especially the plight of women and gays. I found an improbable amount of empathy for these two despite their obvious shortcomings, since eventually they’re as much victims of this system—typified by a slimy Falwell—as they are victimizers within it. Chastain and Garfield are capable of showing the pained souls underneath the layers of fakery.

Garfield’s at his best, though, in tick, tick…BOOM! Here he inhabits the bohemian energy animating a frustrated artist who believes entirely in his talent, but has run aground on worries he’ll never break through with it. You can see that tension in his posture, the moment where the carefree drains away, leaving that do-or-give-up sense of now or never. In Larson’s semi-autobiographical show, the future writer of Rent is on his eighth year working in a diner while struggling to complete a sci-fi musical opus. (That we know the real Larson would die before Rent opens gives a melancholy layer to this youthful work.) Under the direction of Miranda, it becomes a kind of doubled vision of aspiring theater-making. He knows of musical workshops and the difficulty in honing a massive vision to a kind of pop theatrical purity. (One sees his capable direction in this feature and might think, gee, does the creator of In the Heights and Hamilton need to be a solid filmmaker, too?). 

Told through the kind of conversationally anthemic songs that would make Rent itself such Gen X lightning-in-a-bottle, the musical plays out in greasy booths and corner offices, cramped apartments overflowing with struggling artists and practice spaces warmly lit. Garfield sits at a piano and invites us into his mindset—a frame story that snaps into place with a softly moving reveal near the end—while a backing band croons support. He takes us into anecdotes as he drafts songs and scrapes together money, tries to get his agent to call back, juggles friendships and romance, and, yes, takes shifts serving coffee and toast to dismissive diners. Miranda balances the tone between realist and theatrical and Garfield straddles both admirably, able to dive into an artificial flourish of magical realism as his character’s Broadway mind imagines his surroundings out into stage lighting and prosceniums, or hunker down on the arm of a tattered couch to extemporaneously sing his feelings. The rest of the cast (Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesus, Vanessa Hudgens) capably follows along as a swirling ensemble of influences, supportive yet clear-eyed. The songs are strong; the dynamics are believable; the small flights of fancy are a window into a writer’s mind where everything can be material. The constant across scenes is the simmering suspense of doubt that’ll be painfully familiar to anyone who has ever felt stuck in a life of artistic interests, in that awful double-bind of needing experience to get recognition and recognition to get experience. He just needs a break. The clock’s ticking.

Days of Alternate Past: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

X-Men: Apocalypse lives up to its name, putting the entire globe in jeopardy, but also proving high stakes spectacles work if you tap into the dread of them. There’s a sequence here where an all-powerful ancient superbeing launches every nuke in the world and it’s shot with such solemn gravity, taking in the faces of regular humans looking up in awe at their imminent possible demise, that it has weight and terror many films of this ilk either skip right past or take for granted. When Bryan Singer’s X-Men was released in 2000 it was considered acceptable stakes for a sci-fi action movie to merely menace a small gathering of dignitaries in New York. But recently, with movies like Batman v. Superman and the Transformers and Avengers regularly tearing up entire cities, there’s been something of a superhero stakes race, threatening ever more danger and destruction for less and less of an effect. When everything’s the end of the world, nothing is.

Now, returning for his fourth time directing this series, Singer knows every other superhero movie somehow takes outsized cataclysms and boils down to the same punching and shooting. Apocalypse understands we really want to see psychic energy swords, teleportation, shape shifting, bolts of lightening, and two telekinetic beings fighting each other on a mental battlefield. It ends with a symphony of superpowers, creatively sent into battle against others in clever combinations. And this CGI slugfest is earned by taking time to introduce its menagerie of mutants, adroitly and organically integrating a dozen or more characters, giving them each great splash page show-off moments as well as an emotional grounding for interwoven arcs. Singer crafts compelling images interested in the visceral horror and whimsical delight of having these powers, never losing sight of either’s impact on the characters in the face of glowing effects-heavy sequences.

This is all part of Singer’s approach to the X-Men, now in its ninth iteration, counting spinoffs. He set a template for the movie world of mutants trying to find acceptance and family. Saving the world is simply an outgrowth of their interpersonal dramas, calamities brought about by their angst. As this movie begins – on a reset timeline after the time-travel loop-de-loop of Days of Future Past – Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running his school for mutants, including new students like Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Scott Summers, who will become Cyclops (Tye Sheridan).  Teachers include Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Havoc (Lucas Till). Meanwhile, chameleon Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground rescue operation for abused or captured mutants like young teleporter Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), while Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is in hiding, living a quiet small-town life in Poland. They just want to live comfortably and secretly with their powers, and Singer, with a screenplay by Simon Kinberg, finds time to seriously consider their attempts at understanding their powers.

Alas, peace is not to be, as the aforementioned superbeing who wants to destroy the world awakens with much fanfare. He is Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac under a pile of blue makeup), the world’s first mutant, an ancient Egyptian worshiped as a God for all his wild powers, then buried comatose under a pyramid for thousands of years. When he wakes up to be the villain of this 1983-set alt-history, he wants to destroy the world, but only because he’s lashing out from jealousy and a God complex. While a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) investigating his return warns Professor X about the looming danger, Apocalypse wanders around gathering up rogue mutants for his army, using his power to tempt them to the dark side by amplifying their gifts. He finds: Storm (Alexandra Shipp), an orphan who can control the weather; Angel (Ben Hardy), a cage-fighter with an impressive wingspan; and Psylocke (Olivia Munn), a psychic with energy blades. As he picks them up, he gives them makeovers and snazzy costumes he conjures out of thin air, a neat, convenient trick.

Apocalypse – a fairly one-note villain, but at least he’s new – gains in power, eventually convincing Magneto to join his crusade to remake the world by bringing it to an end, the better to start over with proper mutant worship again. Magneto is torn between a desire to avenge his tragic past – which adds another heart-wrenching trauma early on here – and a need to prove his power and the potential for mutant dominance. He excavates his pain in a sequence at Auschwitz that’s borderline tasteless before gaining eerie pop power as the conflicted villainous man pulls the entire concentration camp apart in a cloud of debris as exorcism. Fassbender does admirable work bringing real sorrow and grief to his portrayal of Magneto, and makes it fit seamlessly into a big Hollywood sci-fi action confection in which a team of superhero teens led by a bald man in a wheelchair must stop an ancient blue God from ending humanity. Singer maintains an engaged and gripping thriller pace slowly drawing many strands together to the inevitable climactic conflagration.

It sounds complicated, bringing so many characters together and sending them into conflict with each other in a tone that’s both gravely serious and goofy fluff. But Singer pulls off this balancing act while confidently shrugging off baggage of prior films and wearing expectations of so much muchness lightly, engaging in straight-faced comic book appeal without pandering to nerds or apologizing to everyone else. He cares about using the characters in interesting and creative ways, whether it’s sending Quicksilver (Evan Peters) through an exploding building, in a fine repeat and escalation of the last film’s show-stopping slow-mo sequence, or setting Cyclops loose at a target, reveling in the surprise force of his uncontrollable laser-vision. Apocalypse puts aside Civil Rights subtext for a gripping globetrotting adventure on its way to an electric light show spectacle shot for wonderment and dopey-cool impact. But because Singer and his team treat the whole project earnestly – cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shooting brightly and steadily, capturing performances and effects alike in images that takes in the whole movement and expression of the actions – it has a convincing result.

In a time when superhero movies are churned out as mere content, Singer still makes movies. Apocalypse isn’t short on incident or timeline triangulation. But rather than hitting preordained marks and providing coverage with enough space for teasing future features, he shapes a narrative, building characters to care about with problems to invest in, sending them through varied crescendos and climaxes in setpieces rewarding viewers’ interest with real consequences and fine setups and payoffs contained within the borders of its runtime. (There are echoes and cameos to flatter franchise knowledge, but they aren’t integral to their effect, and add to a genuine comic sense of unashamed retconning.) He deploys polished and poised frames that stand back and handsomely photograph superpowers while understanding that having them and using them takes an emotional toll. It’s fun and involving, all of an exciting, entertaining piece. This isn’t like Captain America: Civil War where characters pop up, show off a power, and then disappear with a tease for their own offshoot. It’s one of the best X-Men movies yet, a full and satisfying ensemble spectacle unto itself.