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‘Limonov: The Ballad’ Review: Ben Whishaw Is The Slippery Star Of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Exhilarating Punk-Poet Biopic – Cannes Film Festival
‘Limonov: The Ballad’ review: Ben Whishaw is the slippery star of Kirill Serebrennikov’s exhilarating Russian punk-poet biopic – Cannes Film Festival
The answer to all of them is, of course, yes.” This is key to understanding Kirill Serebrennikov ’s latest movie, a boundary-blasting biopic that simply drips with punk-rock energy, revealing everything and nothing about a slippery character whose modus operandi was reinvention from the get-go and for whom consistency really was the hobgoblin of small minds. He is desperate to leave the town of his youth, a place where you either “get stabbed in a street fight or drink yourself to death out of boredom.” When Limonov gets to Moscow, the film bursts into color, but even as his career starts to take off, there’s a very real sense that he will never fit in there, and that he probably won’t ever try to. At this point, we are less than halfway through a life that isn’t so much colorful as kaleidoscopic, eventually taking Limonov back to his homeland where, in an extraordinarily metatextual public debate, he is questioned about the veracity of scenes from his various memoirs that have literally just been portrayed in the film we’re watching.
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