Only the most brutish and cold-hearted bully could resist falling for this utterly charming Danish documentary about a bunch of complicated but lovable nerds who pull together to help one of their number, Kim “Cannon Arm” Kobke, break the world record for playing arcade game Gyruss. Director/narrator Mads Hedegaard embeds himself at Copenhagen’s The Shed, one of the last arcades for the full-size gaming machines that used to be so popular before home computers and consoles decimated the market. Although Hedegaard doesn’t really know much about gaming, he gets people and has a knack for jocular, self-referential film-making and nifty editing tricks, which makes him a good match for this particular tight-knit clique of young men. (There is a purple-haired woman on the edge of the group but oddly the film never goes into much detail about her.)
Anyone who has spent time around autistic people will recognise various spectrum traits in some of the bunch, but the abilities and challenges here are enormously varied. Clearly challenged by some forms of social interaction and communication, hero-protagonist Kim is a man of very, very few words – yet he holds down a day job as a lab technician and apparently has four children and one grandchild by a partner or partners unseen. He also has arguably the finest silver mullet, a veritable mane of flowing radiant locks, in northern Europe. One of his friends, big-bearded Michael Dyst, is more loquacious but perhaps less socially adept. He’s published numerous collections of poems and has won awards at local poetry slams; late in the film, he performs one poem where he talks about each of the qualities he hates about himself – autism, having lived with his parents until recently while peers were independent much earlier in life – and slaps himself hard, a scene both moving and hard to watch. Carsten, a cuddly bear of man and Kim’s best friend, studies Bach in intense detail. One of their closest friends, Thomas, killed himself recently but inspired Kim to pursue his dream of breaking the record for Gyruss playing.
Hedegaard cheekily recreates the moment Kim decided to pursue this goal by filming him silently eating a banana, one of his favourite foods, for a good 45 seconds of screentime (which feels like a year). That complements the way the film plays with time throughout, marking the hours with graphics to show how long Kim has been playing during the climactic record-attempt, using time-lapse to speed things up elsewhere, and in general musing on the vastness of the universe and the mutability of all things. Sure, that last bit is a little pretentious, but in the most endearing way possible. Lashings of Iron Maiden and classical music on the soundtrack bounce things along nicely.
• Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest is released on 24 June in cinemas.
