When Wallace, an erratic, former comic book colorist, is confronted with his own failures in Owen Kline’s “Funny Pages,” he makes a declaration that might be the mantra of anyone who strove and couldn’t make it. “You don’t just get to be an artist!” he shrieks at two aspiring teen cartoonists who look to him — the wrong guy, if there ever was one — to be their mentor.
It’s a climactic moment from the outrageous, funny and ultimately moving film, and aptly embodies the theme of this month’s column. In these movies, about artists and writers, musicians and filmmakers, you will see the pain and anguish that is the toil of making art. But occasionally, there is brief ecstasy, too — of creating something, or the faraway dream of it.
‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ (2013)
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In an ideal world, the artist Chris Foss says, the film “Dune” would simply be Alejandro Jodorowsky telling you the story. Indeed, what animates this documentary by Frank Pavich, which details the avant-garde filmmaker’s unrealized cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, is not the possibilities of that wilted project, but Jodorowsky himself: the glint in the artist’s eye, the revived vigor as he details the splendor of his vision.
Jodorowsky is a fascinating protagonist here, a brilliant Chilean-born filmmaker whose tangible passion and humor supersedes any pomposity. He’s totally out there, but you’re compelled to believe in every second of his dreams. Throughout, Jodorowsky explains his plans for a “Dune” that would’ve starred Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger and Orson Welles.
You’re left torn between feelings: happy that the film never got made, so as to preserve the sheer potential and gargantuan daring of Jodorowsky’s artistry, but regretful that such ambition never saw the light of day.
“Movies have heart: boom, boom, boom!” he says at one point, pumping his fist. They have the power to change the world. “I wanted to do something like that — why not?” the artist wonders, before looking down in despair, a wistful pall cast over him.
‘American Movie’ (1999)
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“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is just one in a lineage of documentaries about the madness behind a director’s grand ambition: There’s also Werner Herzog trying to shepherd a steamboat over a mountain (“Burden of Dreams”) and Francis Ford Coppola in the jungle recreating the Vietnam War’s chaos (“Hearts of Darkness”). But what about a yapping Wisconsinite scraping together the pieces to his unfinished short film?
In some ways, Mark Borchardt, the magnetic filmmaker and real-life subject of Chris Smith’s documentary “American Movie,” is just like these other exalted dreamers: deluded, obsessive and bedeviled by the obstacles in the way of his greatness.
Following Borchardt as he desperately tries to get his horror film made — scrounging for funding and guiding mostly amateur actors — the documentary is a tragicomedy about a small-time filmmaker. The comedy is in the give-and-take slackerism between Borchardt and his friend Mike (imagine Beavis and Butthead but in “Fargo”). The tragedy speaks for itself.
“I don’t see how people can go year after year at these stupid jobs and not want to make something of themselves,” he says, along with an expletive. Meanwhile, we watch him shoveling snow in a cemetery, salting its stairs, vacuuming the carpets of its mausoleum.
‘Funny Pages’ (2022)
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You might broadly see this wonderfully grubby film as a portrait of the artist as a young man; really, it’s more a portrait of many failed artists as old men. Owen Kline’s coming-of-age film feels as if the absurdist characters of Robert Crumb’s underground comics jumped from the page and were filmed through the startling lens of a Safdie brothers movie (Josh and Benny Safdie produced the film).
Tragedy strikes quick and hard from the film’s outset, sending its protagonist, a bratty, belligerent and talented young cartoonist named Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), into an antihero’s journey. He drops out of high school, moves into a subterranean shared room in Trenton, N.J., and tries to befriend Wallace (Matthew Maher), the outcast colorist who worked at a comics publisher.
Robert is too rude and too young to listen to anyone but himself; where that leads him is mostly the ugly terrain of men with unrealized dreams. Yet, the special quality of the film is in its sneaky humanist wisdom, or to borrow a phrase from the film, in its belief in failing with soul.
‘Shirley’ (2020)
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This film from director Josephine Decker follows the writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) as she works on a novel based on a real case of a local young woman found mysteriously dead. But mostly it’s about the difficulties of Jackson’s inner life as an agoraphobic genius. She is in a constant push and pull with her pretentious professor husband played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a phenomenal and complex dynamic that Moss embodies alongside him. Things change when a younger couple moves into their house, and Shirley begins bonding with the expecting wife, Rose (Odessa Young).
In their relationship, Decker unfolds the trope of the tortured, unstable artist into something deeper: a story about female madness and unruliness that is, more truthfully, the story of women trapped in a society that uses and casts them aside.
‘Her Smell’ (2018)
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Shortly before she was a writer in “Shirley,” Elisabeth Moss was a rocker, playing Becky, a chaotic front woman of a famous rock band in “Her Smell,” Alex Ross Perry’s portrait of a spiral to rock bottom.
Perry’s film is in a way both lean and claustrophobic: It contains only five scenes, tracking Becky as she tears herself and her band apart, and the aftermath of it all. Each scene is punctuated by home video footage of the band’s early days. Flitting between the two modes, the film conjures the jarring feeling of looking into an ugly mirror, as if a thrashing, strung-out Becky is being confronted by her once bright future.
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