Rhys Ifans is all over the Edinburgh film festival like a rash: this is the third new film, after Under Milk Wood and The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, featuring the now decidedly grizzled actor who – strange as it may seem – appears to embody some kind of British rock’n’roll chic as far as certain film-makers are concerned.
Canadian-born commercials director Tim Godsall is the latest to deploy Ifans’ unique charms, and the actor pretty much picks up where he left off in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg as a midatlantic idea of an aging Britrocker. Here, though, he is a lot more successful than the leather-jacketed loser in Baumbach’s film: the idea here is that he is some sort of veteran of the punk era who sold out, sold lots of records and then graduated to the producers’ chair. As befits a man of advanced middle age, he is encumbered by family responsibilities, business worries and property management: at least, very rock’n’roll versions of them.
Ifan’s Len has in fact holed up on an isolated house (we first encounter him as he idly watches The Sweeney on DVD – very rock’n’roll). His teenage son Max (Jack Kilmer) arranges to visit, with the hidden agenda of playing his dad his own demo tape. At the same time, Len’s newest protege Zoe (a messed-up pop moppet played by Juno Temple) bales out on her live shows and heads for Len’s hideaway in the throes of a breakdown.
Thus the stage is set for a knotty, tangled drama of resentment, uncertainty and trauma; again, very rock’n’roll. Max finds Len’s hands-off parenting tough to take; he also has to deal with the cuckoo in the nest of a local kid called William (Keir Gilchrist) who acts like Len’s surrogate son, or at least an over-helpful personal assistant. Zoe is all over the place: demanding, over-intimate and prickly by turns. (It won’t come as a surprise that the film is actually based on a play, Len, Asleep in Vinyl by Carly Mensch.)
In fact, the rocker stuff is bit of a distraction: there’s some nuanced, intelligent material here, occasionally swamped by the film’s wannabe-hipster, vinyl-loving moves. Ifans comes across as a performer of some maturity; he’s come a long way from the gurning-in-underpants routine in Notting Hill. In the end, this is a drama of moderate ambition, but a strangely satisfying one.
