A legend in his own lifetime, coke-snorting, pill-popping, hard-drinking 38-year-old DJ Frankie Wilde (Kaye) has the world - or the Ibiza part of it at least - at his feet. Tragedy strikes, though, when Frankie starts to go deaf: his wife Sonja (Magowan) leaves, taking their child with her, his label drops him, and the clubs don't want to know. At rock bottom, with no hope to sustain him, Frankie lurches into insanity and despair. Very much a film of two halves, this begins as a raucous pastiche of the hedonistic Ibiza lifestyle, complete with talking heads such as Pete Tong and Carl Cox marvelling at Frankie's talent, and Kaye does full justice to the ludicrous parody that is Frankie Wilde while revelling in the squalor of the DJ's life. But it's in the second half that Kaye offers an unexpectedly subtle performance from the erstwhile Dennis Pennis; once Frankie has dealt with his cocaine addiction (a surreal sequence in which a massive coke-badger is summarily executed), the film becomes a gentler albeit somewhat predictable affair in which Frankie comes to terms with his new life, opens himself up to love, and discovers that the music lives on within him, regardless of whether he can hear it or not. Worth a look.
