Mister America (Eric Notarnicola, 2019) (Patreon)

As a feature film, Mister America would be, one assumes, a logical entry point for the large and interlocking Tim Heidecker Project, which has expanded well beyond the sketch comedy program (Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!) that first brought him to widespread attention. Now Deckerheads can follow his fake movie review show with Gregg Turkington, his fake action series, and I guess maybe he has a fake band? And then there was his performance in Rick Alverson's The Comedy, which may or may not have been a fake performance. Hard to say.

Mister America draws on a lot of this material, as well as a miniseries called "The Trial" from 2017 in which Heidecker plays the defendant in a murder trial. "Tim" hosted an EDM festival and distributed poisoned vape inhalers that killed 19 people, and then went on to act as his own attorney in the subsequent second-degree murder trial. Clips from "The Trial" appear throughout Mister America, and this event forms the backstory for the film itself. Heidecker, wanting to get even with the San Bernardino DA who tried to prosecute him, decides to launch a longshot campaign for DA himself, despite having no obvious qualifications.

Mister America is framed like a documentary about "Heidecker's" dark horse bid for DA, but for the most part it's a showcase for the blustering, psychotic-narcissist white guy character the writer-performer has been developing across these various platforms for the last several years. He is shameless, uncouth, and has such an unshakable belief in his own bullshit that it almost qualifies as a superpower. He is, in short, "Mister America," the Trumpian white masculine prototype. 

And while Heidecker's project is admirable on its face -- many folks I greatly respect love his stuff, and seem to really appreciate his Andy Kaufmanesque commitment to the bit -- I'm not sure it tells us anything we don't already know. It isn't particularly amusing. (Trump and Trumpism aren't funny yet, and they actually may never be.) And given the fact that it's not especially hard to act like a pompous psychopath, it doesn't score particularly well as pure theater either. (Compare Heidecker's irony-tinged swagger to a truly disconcerting "work" [?] like Vincent Gallo's persona, which combines redneck conservatism with disarming vulnerability.) So in the end, I feel like Mister America is just another dispatch from a universe that is hermetically sealed, and yet somehow painfully familiar.