'Mainstream': Gia Coppola's Slender YouTuber Satire Misses a Cheap Target [Venice Review]

The age of social media is a trap for contemporary writers and filmmakers eager to Say Something. From fusty old Facebook to Instagram to platforms most people over 25 couldn’t even name, it presents all manner of topical ironies and iniquities in society at large, all too easily open to commentary and critique by artists who needn’t look further than the device in their hand for research. The catch, of course, is that social media shifts and changes faster than the weather: a script that begins life as an urgently of-the-moment meditation on the Twitter/TikTok/Tinder era is liable to be a time capsule once the finished film reaches theaters.

READ MORE: 2020 Venice Film Festival Preview: All The Must-See Films To Watch

The smart films in this genre get around these moving goalposts by setting out to capture a particular place and point in digital time, rather than the big, impossible Now. “The Social Network” remains the original gold standard of social media movies precisely because it tackled the origin of a change in the way we communicate, not its uncontrollable outcome. Gia Coppola‘s “Mainstream,” on the other hand, stumbles gauchely into every pitfall of this particular subgenre: it’s a big, blunt, sanctimonious satire of YouTuber idolatry that, for all its bug-eyed, pin-balling energy, never feels remotely ahead of the curve.

READ MORE: Fall Film Preview: 40 Most Anticipated Films To Watch

That’s disappointing from Coppola, whose 2013 debut “Palo Alto” was a coolly studied, sensitive mosaic of adolescent melancholy and yearning, with enough formal poise and human touch to suggest she had a viable career beyond the privileges granted by her name. Arriving seven years later — she’s been busy with music videos for the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Blood Orange in the interim — “Mainstream” feels far more like a callow freshman effort, frantically tricked out with visual gimmicks and affected whimsy, none of which freshen up its palpably millennial stance on that ever-renewing question of whether or not the kids are all right. (They’re not, in its hysterical, helium-dizzy view, but do adults ever think otherwise?)

READ MORE: 52 Films Directed By Women To Watch In 2020

So closely does Coppola’s allegedly original screenplay retrace the arc of Elia Kazan‘s acrid media satire “A Face in the Crowd,” it qualifies as a virtual (in all senses) remake. Kazan’s film, under-appreciated and ahead of its time in 1957, still stings with salty, cynical conviction in its study of a drunken, drifting hick molded by savvy New York radio scout Marcia Jeffries into folksy national treasure Lonesome Rhodes — only to become, bolstered by money and corporate endorsement, a monstrous egomaniac who scorns his devoted public, and pays the price.

Here, Lonesome Rhodes becomes the similarly invented No One Special, a hyperactively zany YouTube influencer played, with no small amount of gurning, glittery gusto, by a surprisingly cast Andrew Garfield. His Svengali, in this case, isn’t a canny media expert, but a fellow loser: Frankie (Maya Hawke), a weary Los Angeles bartender in a crummy cabaret club, who dreams of bigger creative things while posting barely-watched videos to her YouTube page. When she spots Link (Garfield), a loopy but charismatic mall worker in a mouse costume, acting out in the forecourt, she instinctively starts filming: the resulting video gets more hits than everything else she’s posted combined.

Frankie doesn’t quite know what Link’s got, but she knows it’s something: the two begin dating, but it’s clear she’s more intrigued by this scuzzy weirdo — who refuses to carry a cellphone, and keeps talking around his unknown backstory — than she is in love with him. Together with her bartending colleague Jake (an ill-served Nat Wolff), they devise a series of videos, centered on Link’s kerr-azy No One Special persona, that mock the vapid, knuckleheaded hijinks of YouTubers like PewDiePie and Jake Paul. (The latter shows up in a cameo to lend the film some medium cred.)

The videos prove unexpectedly and rapidly popular, soon attracting the attention of a slimebag agent (Jason Schwartzman, skeezy as can be) and Subway-level sponsors. Sure enough, the outsiders who set out to satirize the dumb, desperate measures that YouTubers will take to become famous… become famous themselves. You shouldn’t need a map to tell just how far south this situation is heading, as Link’s head grows even bigger than his luxuriant, surfer-highlighted hair, and his act evolves from spaced-out comedy to vicious, views-chasing exploitation.

Coppola is in no mood for subtlety here, either regarding the film’s billboard-sized moral messaging or its exhausting stylistic frippery. The more embedded Link and Frankie get in the world of YouTube, the more the screen is spangled with video-game graphics, fluorescent Snapchat filters and all the emojis your aching eyes can stand — to the point where Frankie is quite literally vomiting candy-colored digital hearts into the bathroom sink.

That would be fine — YouTube itself is no place for subtlety after all — if “Mainstream’s” too-muchness had even a faint ring of authenticity to it. But at no point does the film suggest a complete grasp of the medium it wants to puncture: much of No One Special’s later YouTube brand resembles barrel-scraping reality TV more than youth-targeting short-form content, and while the team frets about declining video views, nobody seems keyed into the threat of newer platforms. Link may rant at one point about being “cancelled,” but the fact that TikTok is never so much as mentioned in the course of this garish rise and fall does make you wonder when in the last seven years Coppola began her screenplay.

Credit Garfield for giving this thin conceit every ounce of fizzing, frothing energy he can muster. With his eerily always-on delivery and elastic skydancer body language, he’s genuinely hard to look away from: You can see how he could attract a social media cult, even if the script doesn’t always have the clearest idea of what would actually make that happen.

But he’s a firework at the center of a film that, overly anxious to make an impact, surrounds him with a whole bouquet of synthetic sparklers, so we can’t step back from the film’s artifice enough to really observe that of its flailing antihero. Sixty-odd years on, “A Face in the Crowd” still feels prescient and caustically truthful; Lord alone knows what any kids stumbling upon “Mainstream” on some kind of screen in the year 2080 will make of its crude, long-evaporated social commentary. But perhaps they’ll get a kick out its Pleistocene-era emojis. [C-/D+]

Click here to read more of our coverage from the 2020 edition of the Venice Film Festival.