Mainstream movie review & film summary (2021)

Whereas “Palo Alto” was cautiously observational, only commenting on its characters with what amounted to a subdued sympathy, “Mainstream” can’t help but knowingly wag its finger as these three self-styled rebels rise to fame, blunting what little existed of their edge along the way. Link finds an increasingly massive audience, and a kitschy celebrity ego emerges along with his new roles as game-show host and idiot philosopher. Inevitably, he breaks Frankie’s heart as well, shortly thereafter escalating into a full-blown megalomania that Garfield performs with repulsive, near-religious fervor. This doesn’t bode well for our central three, but it’s especially bad news for meeker audience members (one’s played by “Euphoria” star Alexa Demie), whom Link makes a nasty habit of thrusting into the spotlight. 

In directing a spree of music videos in the years since “Palo Alto” (including for Carly Rae Jepsen and the French singer-songwriter SoKo), Coppola has made clear her fascination with the optics of external performance, the elusiveness of emotional reality, and questions of where art exists between the two. But in “Mainstream,” armed with such a moralistic narrative, this career interest curdles into a more outmoded contempt. 

Coppola has been open about her debt to Elia Kazan’s 1957 classic “A Face in the Crowd,” which foregrounded Andy Griffith’s iconically obnoxious performance as Lonesome Rhodes, a Carolina drifter turned demagogue. Frenzied and forthright, Kazan’s film explored the parasitic bonds between celebrity, mass media, and American politics; perhaps needless to say, it’s since been afforded the power of prescience. But a similar fate seems unlikely for “Mainstream,” which rolled cameras in 2019 and already feels passé, particularly given its yesteryear focus on YouTube as opposed to more relevant competitors like TikTok and Twitch. (This extends to the stunt casting of vloggers like Jake Paul, whose social-media moment has so long since passed he’s rebranded as an amateur boxer.)

“Palo Alto” drifted on the strength of its stylistic cohesion, the emotional vacancy of its adolescent leads heightening an amorphous quality in its surrounding atmosphere. “Mainstream,” a more forcefully material object in every sense, drills down hard into its subject, jettisoning Coppola’s previous restraint in favor of a more confrontational and graceless hyperactivity. 

Reteaming with many of her “Palo Alto” collaborators, Coppola’s film is stylistically assured, even if some of its bigger swings fail to connect. “Mainstream’s” commentary and Garfield’s outsized performance may be what audiences remember most walking out of the theater, but cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw is wonderfully precise about traversing a spectrum of neon tones, elsewhere conjuring a haunted ambience that settles over the film’s Los Angeles like a thick fog.