The literary world missed the memo: I’m supposed to be famous by now. 

But aren’t we all? 

The first ingredient for seeking fame while pursuing a fine art is a healthy ego. It is only after an artist becomes famous and successful that they can fake humility. Until then, we’re all scratching and clawing at the walls, trying to be noticed.

And stupendous talent isn’t always a prerequisite for success in the arts. Sure, there needs to be a basic awareness of craft, as well as some innate ability, but the most talented artists aren’t always the most successful or famous. 

I’m not talking about myself, of course. 

With age comes the recognition of our limitations, and there is a reason that I’m hacking out columns while drinking a beer in my basement and not working on my next novel while sipping a fine chardonnay in my chalet.

Instead, I’m talking about the musician Ike Reilly, who fronts a band called The Ike Reilly Assassination. 

In August, directors Michael O’Brien and Mike Schmeideler released a documentary film on Reilly titled “Don’t Turn Your Back on Friday Night.” The film is a refreshing reminder that not all prodigiously talented artists attain worldwide fame. 

I was first introduced to Ike Reilly in Steve Almond’s 2010 book “Rock and Roll Will Save Life.” As a fan of Reilly’s music, I had arrived late to the game. By 2010, Reilly had already released more than a half dozen albums, all except one record released on an independent label called Rock Ridge Music. 

A former gravedigger and hotel doorman, Reilly has lived his entire life in the same town north of Chicago named Libertyville, Ill.—which also happens to be Marlon Brando’s hometown. The documentary captures a lot of Reilly’s backstory, from marrying his high school sweetheart and raising a family, to his decision to give the rock n’ roll life a twirl in his 30s.

Reilly’s first album “Salesman and Racists” was supposed to set the music industry ablaze in 2001, and Universal Records offered Riley a large advance. The album was critically-acclaimed, and to this day, “Salesman and Racists” remains one of those rare albums where I won’t skip a track.

But for some reason—there is a lot of conjecture in the film, including the inability to neatly package Reilly’s music for a specific demographic—it never happened.

The documentary, however, is about far more than a promising rock star who never lived up to the hype and expectations set by the music industry. It’s about how Reilly refused to sell out and continues to create great music on his own terms, in spite of everything. It’s about how Reilly reconciled with his own demons and double-downed on his family. 

Aside from being a compelling story, “Don’t Turn Your Back on Saturday Night” also contains some dynamite tunes. If you’re not familiar with Ike Reilly’s work, this is a good place to start. Many of his relative hits (or my favorite songs)are featured in the film, including the title song, “Commie Drives a Nova,” “I Will Let You Down,” “Garbage Day” and “Born on Fire.”

Steve Almond poignantly describes Reilly’s music in his book: “[Ike Reilly] sounded like Dylan, if Dylan had been Irish instead of Jewish and never left the Midwest and had grown up listening to the Clash rather than Woody Guthrie.”  

Most of all, Ike Reilly is a storyteller and a poet, and any time you find a storyteller and a poet who also makes beautiful music, it is a gift indeed. 

So who cares if they never get really famous? To use a platitude, it is all about the art. 

In “Sugar Daddy,” comedian Sam Morrison sets out to convert tragedy into stand-up comedy. A form of self-therapy, the show (at the Wallis through Oct. 13) recounts the story of how he met the “daddy” of his dreams, only to lose him a few years later to COVID.

Morrison wasn’t necessarily looking for long-term romance when he traveled to the gay mecca of Provincetown for the Spooky Bear festival. He was certainly eager to meet men, preferably older, with large bellies and generous dispositions. But young, handsome and on vacation, he was raring to sample the menu.

“I’m a diabetic,” he explains at the top of the show. “My type is Type 1 but my type is Type 2.” He doesn’t mind if you label him a “chubby chaser,” but he’ll call you a “golden retriever” for being turned on by bones.

The production, directed by Stephen Brackett, who was nominated for a Tony for his staging of “A Strange Loop,” features an egg-like object on Arnulfo Maldonado’s set. This odd-shaped sculpture transforms through Alex Basco Koch’s video design into a massive hairy belly that Morrison rubs affectionately. He likes what he likes, and if you think his taste is weird, he finds conventional heterosexuality to be even weirder.

His meet-cute with Jonathan is assisted by a Category 3 hurricane. Morrison was staying in a hammock on a campground that was good for an orgy but not ideal for a natural disaster. He needed shelter, which meant that he needed to find a hook-up before the bars closed.

Surely there must be a lonely bear willing to rescue a 20-something fetishist in distress. But before Morrison knew it, the clubs had closed and he was stranded under a metal awning at a pizzeria in a state of growing panic. “I’m an anxious, asthmatic, ADHD, gay, diabetic Jew,” he shrieks, repeating the list so that the audience can register the gravity of the situation.

Salvation comes when a man slams into him. Morrison was about to scream but changes his mind when he saw how good-looking the guy was. “You’re the hottest daddy in Ptown,” he said with a drunken effusiveness that earned him an invitation to a tiny Airbnb.

Nora Ephron probably wouldn’t haven’t been tempted to turn this story into a rom-com. The transactional nature of the affair isn’t especially heartwarming. The words “old” and “fat,” while spoken lustfully by Morrison in his setup, reflect a pattern of mind that reduces gay people to physical and sexual stereotypes. Morrison, who punctuates lines with the exclamation “slay!,” sounds at times like Grindr sprung to life.

Despite their many differences, the two men start dating in New York. Jonathan worships Liza while Morrison idolizes Lizzo, but they both love to laugh and have sex, and what more does a couple need?

When Jonathan suggests that Morrison move into his apartment, Morrison gets cold feet. But a few months later, after COVID upended the world, they decided to quarantine at Morrison’s grandmother’s house in Rockland County, N.Y. Hiding out with his older lover at his grandmother’s during a global crisis seems like a ripe opportunity for comedy, but Morrison doesn’t give us many details other than that they developed their own affectionate form of nonsense talk.

As tensions arose a few months into their confinement, they took off for a now eerily empty Provincetown. The exact chronology of events is blurred by the way Morrison jumps around in time, but when Jonathan tests positive for COVID, no one suspects that in two weeks he’ll be on a ventilator.

“Sugar Daddy” does something that I haven’t seen much despite the extraordinary number of COVID deaths. It makes a record of one person’s sudden loss.

Jonathan is lovingly remembered, though his portrait is only sketched. Morrison misses his late partner’s gigantic belly laugh that would engulf everything in its orbit. The first time he heard it, Morrison assumed that Jonathan was on Molly, but he was just naturally high on humor.

Morrison’s observations of Jonathan take the form of quips. We’re told that Jonathan liked to order “no less than 400 appetizers for the table” when out with friends and that he left a generous mound of ashes that was easily divided by loved ones. Not wanting to be maudlin, Morrison sometimes comes off as shallow.

He is determined to stay true to his stand-up calling. Everything is fair game for laughs, including his glucose monitor, which in an interesting twist turns out to be a legacy of his relationship (and the unexpected meaning behind the show’s title).

There’s talk of “Sugar Daddy” moving to Broadway. The show is presented by some high-powered names, including Alan Cumming and Billy Porter. But comedy is subjective: What one person may find a laugh riot, another may dismiss as grating attention-seeking.

A self-described “millennial comedian,” Morrison doesn’t strike me as the cleverest crafter of jokes. He doesn’t have Hannah Gadsby’s verbal finesse, Alex Edelman’s zeitgeist radar or Mike Birbiglia’s off-beat wryness.

The strained delivery of punchlines made me wonder if Morrison had honed his stand-up act in noisy gay clubs over drink orders. I’m touched by his story and applaud his resilience, but “Sugar Daddy” didn’t provoke many memorable belly laughs from this sympathetic critic.

White Bird, 2024.

Directed by Marc Forster.
Starring Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Bryce Gheisar, Gillian Anderson, Helen Mirren, Jo Stone-Fewings, Patsy Ferran, Stuart McQuarrie, Olivia Ross, Ishai Golan, Nadine Leon Gobet, John Bubniak, Jim High, Philip Lenkowsky, James Beaumont, Teagan Stark, Priya Ghotane, Yelisey Kazakevich, Jem Matthews, Sam Talacko, Timon McLean, Selma Kaymakci, Lily Huong Mac, Adam Bakule, Anise Napoleao dos Reis, Jordan Cramond, and Laura Hudečková.

SYNOPSIS:

Struggling to fit in at his new school after being expelled for his treatment of Auggie Pullman, Julian is visited by his grandmother and is transformed by the story of her attempts to escape Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

Thankfully retitled to just White Bird rather than the initial clunky title misleading viewers into believing that this is a spinoff story to 2017’s moving Wonder (starring Owen Wilson, Julia Roberts, and Jacob Tremblay), director Marc Forster (working with screenwriter Mark Bomback and adapting the novel from R.J. Palacio, who also wrote Wonder) tells a bloated but riveting and emotionally impactful Holocaust drama/romance about being othered and the importance of kindness, wrapped up in a modern-day framing device attempting to get the point across that such positivity and niceness is something that has to be learned and instilled into others.

Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar) has recently been transferred to a different school, yet he struggles with being nice. He dismisses a girl soliciting him to join a social justice program and is generally disinterested in making friends. After returning home, he finds his Jewish grandmother Sara (Helen Mirren) there as his parents are at a soirée. She reveals that he was expelled from the previous school and implies that he needs to change his tune. Thus begins a lengthy childhood story dating back to World War II in France, just before its Nazi occupation.

Now played by Ariella Glaser, Sara is a young girl without much to worry about, admitting that she lived and mostly spoiled life until the Nazi invasion. This also means that she never made much of an effort to stand up to her friends for bullying Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt), a young boy with polio walking on crutches. While the other boys give her cruel, backhanded remarks that her sketches are “good for a Jew,” he is nothing but polite and nice, carrying himself with dignity surrounded by misinformed and nasty rumors and insults. Once Nazi Germany begins to invade, Sara is tragically separated from her parents (forced to flee friends) and a schoolteacher desperately attempting to keep her safe, eventually winding up taken in by Julien and his parents following a suspenseful cat and mouse in some wintry woods. They hide her in a sizable barn, committed to nurturing her with whatever she needs.

It’s also here where these two teens, othered by society for different reasons, start bonding while tapping into the power of a limitless imagination as freedom. Although the CGI and special effects are rough, it is admirable that the filmmakers try to bring that fantasy to life, such as when Sara and Julien imagine exploring Paris and New York. Julien continues to express impressed feelings toward Sara’s art while her misconceptions of his disability gradually disappear until she only sees him for his bravery and generosity. Seeing how that instills more confidence in Julien is also sweet and moving.

There is also an unexpected darkness to White Bird. Granted, perhaps that should be expected considering the film is grappling with the Holocaust, but for a somewhat family-friendly story preaching kindness, this narrative does not hold back on the danger and disturbing actions of the Nazis. As a result, parts of the film are heartwrenching, reaching an unflinchingly bleak depiction of reality.

As Julian listens to this longwinded story that takes all day for Sara (the occasional interlude of them conversing is generally further shrouded in evening darkness), one is somewhat surprised he hasn’t cut off his grandmother and asked if he can go play video games yet. That’s not a knock on the narrative, but more general surprise that the kid has lasted this long hanging on every word in suspense. It’s less of a spoiler and more common sense that Julian chooses kindness by following this story of treating others with acceptance and respect, but since there is so little happening between him and grandmother Sara, it doesn’t feel fully earned. With that said, the message and intent are enough to make up for that. It also helps to have that call to action be delivered by a legend such as Helen Mirren.

Even the more overcranked melodramatic beats between young Sara and Julien work since they are grounded in character and become focal points of conversation. There isn’t a sense that White Bird is dumbing anything down for its audience or trying to protect them from harsh realities, which is also a bold move for something that also feels targeted at young children who are old and mature enough to engage with harrowing Holocaust material. The film is as long-winded as the storytime, but a cumulative emotional punch and necessary message override some of its flaws.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist