Leto (2018, Kirill Serebrennikov) (Patreon)

46/100

Not sure how many people still remember Backbeat, the 1994 Iain Softley film depicting the Beatles' time in Hamburg (with an emphasis on Stuart Sutcliffe, played by Stephen Dorff). Can't say I have especially vivid memories of it myself, but I do recall that its impact was largely predicated on our knowledge of what the Beatles will become—without that context, it would surely seem weirdly slight, maybe even pointless. Similarly, Leto—which chronicles the early, pre-fame career of Russian rock star Viktor Tsoi, focusing on his friendship with peer/mentor Mike Naumenko—simply doesn't mean a lot to someone like me, who'd never previously heard of either man (or even of their respective bands, Kino and Zoopark). Director Kirill Serebrennikov clearly made the film primarily for a Russian audience, and it's hard even to imagine an alternative, honestly; any effort to bring the ignorant up to speed would surely require someone to be Boris Exposition: "Say, isn't this the city's first and currently sole venue for what's still widely perceived as decadent western-style music? Check out all the cultural pioneers!" But without an understanding of Tsoi and Naumenko's importance in the Leningrad music scene, as well as awareness of the ticking clock (both of them died very young, about a year apart), it's hard to know what to make of Leto's amorphous parade of mundane incidents, which never quite seem—from this limited perspective—to coalesce into anything particularly meaningful. There's a low-key professional rivalry, exacerbated by an equally low-key love triangle involving Naumenko's wife, but none of it would pass dramatic muster were these fictional characters. You have to mentally juxtapose the film's nascent present with an unseen future. Odd choice for Cannes Competition, assuming that it's not just Americans who are unfamiliar with Soviet rock legends; predictably, I perked up mostly during fantasy sequences that underline the influence on our heroes of artists I do know: Talking Heads, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed. (Was also amused by Serebrennikov's choice of songs that allow most of his actors to avoid singing English words—we get both "Psycho Killer"'s "fa fa fa fa" and "The Passenger"'s "la la la la.") Those anarchic bursts of energy, which also involve playful animation, briefly made me feel included in Leto's portrait of youthful creativity and rebellion. But then the film would return to its bland interpersonal dynamic, and I'd return to shrugging at a previously unexplored era in the lives of icons I don't know.