![]() ![]() ![]() A later moment that feels like a tepid rehash of “The Comedy” finds him walking into a barbershop and lecturing two young men of color about how great their neighborhood was “in the good old days.”Īside from a climactic rally where it becomes hard to suss fact from fiction, the funniest and/or most pointed stuff in “Mister America” tends to come from people who are part of the charade. In one scene, Heidecker barges into a family restaurant and asks a tableful of patrons if they’re potential voters (“I just want to know that I’m not wasting my time”). It’s equal parts funny and frightening to watch him accost strangers for their signatures, as he runs his campaign with all the social grace of a serial killer. The comedian continues his “On Cinema” performance as an outrageously arrogant version of himself, an ego monster with a Trumpian gift for transmuting ignorance into anger. “Mister America” might be a much tougher sit for the uninitiated than it is for all the TimHeads out there, but even those who don’t enjoy this half-baked stunt of a movie should be able to appreciate how sardonically it smudges the thin line between freedom and chaos.ĭirected by “Nathan for You” vet Eric Notarnicola, whose TV work has elevated “Borat”-style comedy to cringe-worthy new heights, “Mister America” uses both professional actors and random people in a way that helpfully destabilizes the entire project, while (less helpfully) making you wish that Heidecker had just entered the San Bernardino DA race for real. Besides, we all live at a time when a thin-skinned bully redoubled his efforts to take over the world after a comedian made fun of him at a fancy dinner party, so it’s not like anyone is going to be all that starved for context. The movie is (extremely) fine with being a fans-only affair, but the fact is that Heidecker’s comedy thrives in the liminal space between what’s supposed to be funny and what’s not, and the one thing he can’t afford to do is stop to explain the joke. That may not make a ton of sense to anyone who didn’t watch Tim’s Electric Sun Desert Musical Festival go disastrously wrong in season nine of “On Cinema at the Cinema,” but “ Mister America” - the new mockumentary about Heidecker’s malicious political campaign - doesn’t really seem to care. ‘Only Murders’ Premiere Showcases Best Use of Meryl Streep in Years You can hear it on albums like “Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs,” in which he mocks our reality TV president in order to grapple with the futility of mocking our reality TV president.Īnd you can watch it darken and metastasize for hours and hours and hours on end as part of the ever-expanding “ On Cinema” universe, which started as one giant subtweet of a movie review podcast before it grew to encompass 11 seasons of a television show, a five-hour fake murder trial, and now a feature-length film in which Heidecker campaigns to become the San Bernardino County District Attorney in order to get revenge on the man who (rightly) tried him for his role in an EDM concert where 18 people vaped themselves to death. ![]() You can see it in “ The Comedy,” a semi-improvised satire in which Heidecker gave one of the decade’s great performances as a trust fund man-child who gets unmoored between irony and entropy. ![]() It’s hard to define exactly what actor/comedian/musician Tim Heidecker does - the deliberate result of a Dead Sea-dry sense of humor that can make even his most committed supporters feel like they’re not always in on the joke - but if anything binds his various projects together it might be a consistent effort to explore the value of absurdity in an increasingly absurd world. ![]()
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