This Must Be the Place (15)

HHH

Dir: Paolo Sorrentino

With: Sean Penn, Frances McDormand

Running time: 112 minutes

HERE'S a tough sell. Starring everyone's favourite political commentator, Sean Penn, This Must Be the Place is a defiantly bizarre drama, a film that delights in its strangeness all the while trying to tell a serious tale of fathers and sons suffering and revenge.

Penn, looking like a Robert Smith from The Cure tribute act, plays Cheyenne, a once famous rocker who has now retired to a big house in the Irish countryside. There, when not having gnomic conversations with strangers who cross his path, he shoots the breeze with his firefighter wife, Jane (Frances McDormand).

There are hints of some long-buried trouble that forced Cheyenne to become a recluse, but the real problem lies ahead of him. His father is ill, and Cheyenne must go home to America to make peace. What he ends up doing is embarking on a road trip and seeking revenge.

Director Paulo Sorrentino, helmer of the equally startling and utterly cool Il Divo, has a style and attitude like few other directors working today. He has found the perfect actor in Penn, who throws himself into the part of Cheyenne like it might be his last acting job in the world.

The story might prove too outrageous for many. Ditto the film's relentless strangeness. That said, Sorrentino works something of a miracle. Step by step, he makes this oddball likeable. There are laughs to be had too, not just at Cheyenne but with him. Helping Penn on the acting front, besides the always terrific McDormand, is Judd Hirsch. With Sorrentino, and performances by David Byrne, they turn the weird into some kind of wonderful.

Glasgow Film Theatre, tomorrow-April 19.