This Must be the Place

My favourite Talking Heads tune changes regularly. Depending on my mood, it could be anything from Slippery People to Life During Wartime to Once In A Lifetime but they always have to battle it out with the consistent old favourite that is This Must Be The Place. The song gets a few makeovers in Paolo Sorrentino's oddball drama but it's left to David Byrne to provide the best version here, which turns to be the greatest moment of the movie. Bar that beautiful four minutes or so where Byrne and co. indulge a Stop Making Sense live spectacle of the tune before Sorrentino allows his camera to glide over the crowd to find a morose Cheyenne (Penn) in the corner, there's not much else happening.

Penn plays an 80s goth rock star called Cheyenne, but he's really The Cure's Robert Smith, a burnt out former great hiding from the world since a fan, inspired by his gloomy lyrics, committed suicide. Now, with a cracked, unsure voice that's part John Hurt in Elephant Man and Ralph Brown in Withnail & I, this man-child shuffles about his spacious Dublin house and grounds in short pants and knee socks, mumbling incoherently, his zest for life and mechanism gone.

Then suddenly Sorrentino's movie takes a wild left turn and morphs into a road movie with a peculiar quest: travelling to New York for his estranged father's funeral, Cheyenne learns that his father was a holocaust survivor who dedicated the remainder of his life to hunting down the man who tortured him in Auschwitz. In a belated gesture of love, Cheyenne decides to complete his father's mission and takes to the road…

It takes some mental gymnastics to get on board with this wild swing and Sorrentino (Il Divo) doesn't do his story any favours with its loose telling - the story meanders here and there so much that remembering why Cheyenne is on this quest gets harder and harder. The problem behind this is that Sorrentino spends so much time in Dublin (a good half hour) before the film finally jumps into life, that it cajoles the audience into thinking they're watching a different film. When it does eventually get down to business, making the next jump - Robert Smith: Nazi Hunter - has to be done all over again. The deathly slow pace begins to get more noticeable as it drags on too. Pit stops to meet Kerry Condon's single mother and Harry Dean Stanton's inventor seem a distraction rather than being integral.

But none of this is Penn's fault, who keeps interest high when it's in danger of flagging. Sure he's got the makeup and the hair and the voice to help out but he completely disappears into the role.

This Must Be The Place is slightly bonkers and not in a good way.