“I was once in the tradition of social realism – but I am now avant-garde and misunderstood.”

Audrey Amiss was an English artist who formally trained until her bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia led to decades of institutionalisation.

Typist Artist Pirate King dramatises her life following a recent discovery of her work. Her story makes for an interesting character study, framed as a simple road film.

Audrey’s artistic style reflects the severity of her illnesses, the realism of her Royal Academy days slowly fading into heavy-handed abstract and emotive strokes. She loses the skill and technique she once had, instead relying on innate intuition alone.

The artwork acts as intertextual snapshots of the events in her life, each one’s style portraying her state of mind at the time. As the film looks at a younger Audrey, the perspective of her art is much closer to reality than the works that diary her more recent life.

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When a hitchhiking young artist tells Audrey he likes outsider art, she sneers at the invalidation. Being defined as an outsider artist is an inherently limiting way to describe something free from convention, after all. A question is asked whether this label is uplifting or an exercise in ‘othering’ from an exclusive and elitist art world.

Monica Dolan strikes a strong performance as Audrey, nailing the unbridled Yorkshire spirit that flows through her conversation. Her portrayal would sit neatly in a Mike Leigh film, exuding a conflicting strangeness and genuineness that makes her character dynamic and real.

Kelly Macdonald plays a social worker named Sandra who acts as the straight woman to Audrey’s more off-the-wall behaviour. She keeps her and the viewer firmly in reality, a responsive force to whatever unique process plays out in Audrey’s head.

It’s through Sandra’s role and reflections on being institutionalised that the state’s capacity to help those suffering with mental illness comes into question.

Audrey has grave mistrust of the state’s help, owing to the factory-like holding pens she was confined in for decades. As conditions change and social care becomes the primary assistance for mental illness sufferers, the continued cuts to funding for such services only result in the same lack of understanding. Sandra tries her best yet clearly doesn’t have the resources to deal with someone as intensive and complicated as Audrey.

The Herald:

While Audrey is an engaging and dynamic character, the film is rarely truly from her perspective. It stands in a reactive position rather than allowing itself to be fully immersed in her world. As a character study, it revels in observation, forgoing the less travelled path of embodying her internality more fully.

The moment we clearly cross into her viewpoint provides a visual metaphor for one of the film’s emotional arcs, yet it feels slightly out of place. Audrey’s character and personality is represented to such depth that it is almost a shame that the one unfiltered moment into her conscience doesn’t give particularly great insight beyond simple resolution.

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There is enough space to play around in the verisimilitude, proven by the film itself. When Audrey escapes Sandra and ends up riding in a man’s van, his sudden turn towards groping her is cartoonishly evil. Out of Sandra’s presence, we’re left to trust Audrey’s experience of events and wonder just how much of a reliable narrator she is. The van parks in a suspicious way, lending credence to her interpretation, yet there is intrigue in what actually happens when all that’s there to rely on is her heightened sense of reality.

Regardless, Typist Artist Pirate King is an incredibly likeable study of Audrey Amiss, the art she produced and its fractured progression, the failures of understanding mental illness and the system around it, and the process of a creator’s hands. She’s not an outsider artist, she’s just avant-garde and misunderstood.