I love you all: Frank

---

Insight

616 

www.thelancet.com/psychiatry   Vol 3   July 2016

In 2005, Jon Ronson failed to win a radio award. 

Despondent, he left the posh hotel where the gongs 

were being given out and bumped into comedian Adam 

Buxton, who’d also gone away empty handed. “You know 

why we always lose?” Buxton asked, “We’re marginal.” 

Ronson found this observation reassuring: “I’d spent 

years frantically reaching for the mainstream—but I didn’t 

have to. It was fi ne. I was marginal. I could still tell these 

stories but they could do something else—they could de-

humiliate, dignify.” Released almost a decade after that 

night, Ronson’s 2014 fi lm  Frank,  co-written with Peter 

Straughan and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, bears 

testament to the endurance of this mission to dignify. 

A fi ctionalised account of Ronson’s real-life experience 

playing keyboards for the comic character Frank 

Sidebottom and his Oh Blimey Big Band between 1987 

and 1990, Frank  retains Sidebottom’s huge banal/

menacing fake head, but ditches the biography of his 

creator, the real life Chris Sievey. Instead it tells us the 

story of another, imaginary Frank (this one played by 

Michael Fassbender), leader of the unpronounceable 

experimental band Soronprfb s. Ronson’s research drew 

on “great musicians who’d ended up on the margins”, 

and so Frank shares creative values, as well as a certain 

vulnerable naivety, with outsider musicians like Daniel 

Johnston and The Shaggs. Like Johnston, too, he has a 

history of mental illness.

When the Soronprfb s keyboard player nearly dies by 

suicide, Frank hires the ambitious, musically talentless 

Jon (Domhnall Gleeson playing a kind of evil version of 

Jon Ronson) to replace him. The band’s theremin player, 

Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking no prisoners) sees Jon for 

the “mediocre child” he is, but Frank is beguiled by Jon’s 

belief that they can fi nd an audience for their music. In 

real life, it was Chris Sievey himself who wanted to fi nd a 

bigger audience for the Oh Blimey Big Band. It was Sievey, 

not Ronson, who took the decision to book a thirty date 

tour and hire the kind of competent musicians that made 

them sound “like an excellent 1980s wedding band”. 

Up until that point,  their audience was niche, to say the 

least:  Ronson remembers a gig in Dudley (Sievey’s all-

time favourite) attracting an audience of just fi fteen, who 

eventually divided themselves into two teams, found a 

ball, and played a game. Gradually, however, Sidebottom’s 

reputation grew. He and the band moved from marginal 

to cult status, launching the career of Caroline Aherne’s 

Mrs Merton along the way. In his memoir of that time, 

Ronson recalls Sievey starting to believe they could go 

even further:  beyond cult, perhaps, and all the way to the 

mainstream. The group imploded.

Drawing on these tensions, Frank  is a cautionary tale 

about the pursuit of fame, a hymn to the creative and 

protective power of the margins. When Jon’s relentless 

blogging and tweeting make social media stars of the 

Soronprfb s, he pushes them towards a supposedly 

career-changing gig at the South by Southwest music 

festival in Texas. But instead of making them successful, 

he’s turning them into something they’re not, urging 

them to compromise, be likeable, turn their backs on the 

“furthest corners” that nourish them. Thrust out of the 

margins and into the spotlight, Frank and the Soronprfb s 

realise that their so-called audience aren’t there for the 

music. They’re little more than a social media freak show, 

famous for their reliance on safe words (“Chinchilla! 

Chinchilla!”) to defuse violent creative spats. When 

Frank’s sanity crumbles under the pressure, guilty Jon 

fi nally understands that he has trashed the delicate eco-

system of the band with his ambitions. The fi lm’s  fi nal 

scenes, in which he belatedly undertakes the Ronsonian 

mission (de-humiliate, dignify) and restores Frank to 

his rightful place, are deeply moving.  Jon has always 

dreamed of shouting “Hello, South by Southwest!” to 

an audience screaming with anticipation, but it’s Frank’s 

less bombastic “El Madrid, it’s nice to see ya”, delivered to 

a mostly indiff erent audience in a bar in the boondocks,   

that feels like a homecoming. 

Laura Thomas

 Movies  of  the  Mind

I love you all: Frank

Magnolia Pictures

Published 

Online

June 14, 2016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/

S2215-0366(16)30140-7

Frank 

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, 

2014.

Running time 94 min

For more information see http://

www.magpictures.com/frank

For Ronson’s memoir see 

https://www.panmacmillan.

com/authors/jon-ronson/frank-

the-true-story-that-inspired-

the-movie

Frank: The True Story that 

Inspired the Movie

Jon Ronson, Pan Macmillan, 

2014.

ISBN 9781447265436