Mister Lonely: Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe Caught in Shocking Tryst!

IFC Films

Morton does Marilyn in Mister Lonely.

Details

Runs at Northwest Film Forum, Fri., May 16–Thurs., May 22. Not rated. 112 minutes.

Related Content

• Boy: Coming of Age in '80s New Zealand
  March 21, 2012
• My Week With Marilyn: A Tepid Movie-Set Romance
  November 23, 2011
• OC Notes' Emerald City Sequence Is A Grade-A Album Disguised As A Soundtrack
  December 20, 2011
• Lennon's Tooth and ScarJo's Tissue: The 10 Weirdest Music Celebrity Auctions of All Time
  November 17, 2011
• Tell Me About That Song: Zander Grey, Guitarist and Vocalist of Alternative-Rockers Letters
  February 29, 2012

More About

• Harmony Korine
• Michael Jackson
• Samantha Morton
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Celebrity News

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

The third feature by Harmony Korine, once the reigning Man You Love to Hate of American indie cinema, is just as likely to confound audiences familiar with the director's prankish rep: a bittersweet fable about faith, the end of innocence, and the search for artistic identity, centering on a lonesome Michael Jackson imitator (the winning Diego Luna) who's summoned by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike (Samantha Morton) to a remote commune for celebrity impersonators. As a metaphor for artistic development, a celebrity impersonator who must ditch his costume and go his own way is a perilously maudlin conceit, especially if you read him as the filmmaker's stand-in. But as director and co-writer (with his brother Avi), Korine has an installation artist's eye (and patience for duration) and a Catskills comic's affection for the threadbare fringes of showbiz. The movie's unmoored imagery has a lingering plaintiveness that even its maker may not be able to explain. Movies tell the same stories over and over, but I know of only one that evokes mourned innocence in just a three-minute slow-motion shot of a Michael Jackson impersonator and a stuffed monkey aboard a clown bike.