The rock rapper plays a faithfully modeled version of himself in Tim Sutton's grimly stylish movie about fame as hell, but his tired PA is the most endearing character.
That Colson Baker can act is not a revelation. The rapper, best known to his legions of fans as Machine Gun Kelly, has already starred in a dozen film and television roles, displaying charisma on screen within admittedly limited limits. His canny casting as Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in the Netflix biopic "The Dirt" paid off, so it's no surprise to see him return to rock star as rock star in the significantly more artsy" Taurus". This time, however, he makes a rather more personal investment, not just as a leading man, but as an executive producer, composer, and script consultant, in a project modeled on, if not his own life, then certainly his own celebrity aura and sound. .
Director: Tim Sutton
Writer: Tim Sutton
Stars: Scoot McNairy, Megan Fox, Ruby Rose
The good news is that he can still act, serving up director Tim Sutton's nasty but steamily atmospheric descent into Hollywood's Hades with a solemn commitment and a wobbly air of physical and spiritual ruin - this is as bravely unflattering as vanity projects get. . The bad news is that the faintly tragic character of "Cole," his alienated, self-destructive but wildly popular alter ego, hardly seems worth Baker's extensive efforts. It's certainly an unsuitable focal point for a sleek but skinny film that brings nothing new to the curious subgenre of fictional but semi-reflexive portraits of music stars, from "Purple Rain" to "8 Mile." It turns out that in 2022, fame is still hell, the machine is still trying to destroy you, and the drugs are still not working.
Sutton, a distinguished cultivator of mood with a recurring affinity for the underbelly of American society, previously worked with Baker on last year's western "The Last Son," and it's not hard to see why the two feel attracted to each other. The jagged, slippery chill of Sutton's cinema complements the jarring malaise of the rapper's music quite nicely. But with Cole, their joint creation, a kind of void at the center of the film, a less-than-expected figure emerges as its heart: haughty rising star Maddie Hasson as Ilana, Cole's beleaguered, abused, but strangely devoted personal assistant.
In fact, "Taurus" is more interesting as a study of the dysfunctionally toxic but standard Hollywood relationship between the star and her assistant, with Ilana simultaneously serving as surrogate mother, sister, and nanny to the incapable Cole, who, even when he's not drugged . a veritable cornucopia of substances, he has the instincts and attention span of a small child. We get little of her backstory, which is both frustrating: every time Ilana drops Cole off at her shiny, barren modernist mansion in the Hollywood Hills, we wish we were following her around for the rest of the night in her place, and probably appropriate. Whatever life and identity she had before her, it seems to have been sucked into the endless need for her boss and ward.
And yet she loves him, in an exhausted and desperate way that goes back and forth throughout the film's week-long timeline, while transporting the usually remote and maverick Cole between recording studio sessions. , interviews, meetings of brand ambassadors, binges in bars and occasional, distant. parenting dates with her 10-year-old daughter Rosie. As the first point of blame for her sharky manager when Cole fails or falters, she goes to great lengths to keep him, if not sober, at least compos mentis. But she can't check on him every hour, and what she does with her drug-dealing friend and various interchangeable lovers is her business, at least until Ilana faces cleaning the next morning.
As an evocation of everyday life and mental decay in the mirrored, resonant void of the super-celebrity, "Taurus" is at least reasonably compelling. In that sense, it is complicit not only in Baker's first-hand conviction in the title role, but also in the expensive, impervious surfaces of Francesca Palombo's production design, and the suffocating neon haze of John Brawley's lenses. who occasionally resorts to giddy tricks to suggest Cole's skewed image. , reality removed.
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