Cast your mind back to September 2020 when the biggest drama at Venice Film Festival was not the raging Coronavirus pandemic (the festival went ahead with social distancing in place) but a controversial film from Gia Coppola which prompted mass walkouts. A satirical take on the culture of fame and fandom surrounding online influencers, Mainstream proved anything but as critics piled on.
The film follows Frankie (Maya Hawke), a young aspiring artist who manages a struggling YouTube channel and comes across the enigmatic Link (Andrew Garfield) while he is working as a costume mascot. Together with Frankie's friend, Jake (Nat Wolff), the trio begin creating content which Link pushes to become increasingly bizarre, as his real backstory becomes clear.
The film sounded like it held some promise with Coppola at the helm; her 2013 drama Palo Alto, starring Emma Roberts and James Franco, was an interesting portrait of the drifting feeling of adolescence. Mainstream also offered an intriguing supporting cast that included Johnny Knoxville, Euphoria's Alexa Demie, and Jake Paul playing (checks notes) Jake Paul. Unfortunately that possibility was truly scuppered by reviews which crucified the film, described, by a critic at IndieWire as, “the grotesque lovechild of Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison in The Doors and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker”, while Variety termed it, “a messy, childish scrawl of a film”.
As with controversial movies like Joker, The Hunt and Cuties, the film has been critiqued for being guilty of the exact kind of hollow shock tactics that it is trying to skewer and adding little else to the conversation. Which might explain why Mainstream, which is currently sitting on a less than ripe Rotten Tomatoes score of 33 per cent, has until now not had a UK release date.
Should you be curious or in need of a Monday night hate-watch, Mainstream has just been quietly added to Amazon Prime Video in the UK and is streaming now.
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