Amer­i­can Interior

The rea­son the flag of Wales is embla­zoned with a big red drag­on is that the Welsh are a peo­ple whose cul­tur­al DNA is suf­fused with myth and leg­end. This sen­ti­ment is stat­ed by Gruff Rhys, charis­mat­ic and light­ly bum­bling front man of indie pop titans, Super Fur­ry Ani­mals, who has late­ly opt­ed to dip his toe into the cool stream of the trav­el­ogue documentary.

Amer­i­can Inte­ri­or is his sec­ond, fol­low­ing on from 2010’s Sep­a­ra­do!, and where that first film pre­sent­ed Rhys as a charm­ing, wide-eyed neb­bish hid­ing behind an over-sized Pow­er Rangers hel­met, this one sees him upgrad­ing to unkempt Her­zo­gian buc­ca­neer whose jour­ney is fuelled by the heady vapours of exis­ten­tial wonderment.

Like all good adven­ture yarns, this one is insti­gat­ed via a mys­te­ri­ous fax. Rhys was noti­fied of the exis­tence of one John Evans when asked to col­lab­o­rate with a local fringe the­atre pro­duc­tion. Evans was a pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry Welsh folk hero of whom there exists very lit­tle in terms of finite his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. He was con­vinced that a Native Amer­i­can who went by the name of Madoc was oper­at­ing a Welsh colony some­where on the banks of the Mis­souri Riv­er, and so set sail to Amer­i­ca in order to make a con­nec­tion with this strange outpost.

To make the project finan­cial­ly viable, Rhys sched­uled a US tour to fol­low in Evans’ boot­prints. Instead of just tum­bling through a trad set-list, he cre­at­ed a mul­ti­me­dia showreel in order to present a breath­less account of Evans’ stu­pe­fy­ing and often death-defy­ing gala­vant. A suave, Mup­pet-like effi­gy of Evans is pro­duced in tan­dem with reg­u­lar SFA album cov­er-artist, Pete Fowler, to facil­i­tate a more visu­al retelling of this tall tale.

There’s some­thing beau­ti­ful and pro­found about the con­cept of Rhys fol­low­ing a guy who fol­lowed a guy who (prob­a­bly) fol­lowed a guy before that. The infer­ence being, if we aren’t able to muster a basic inter­est in who we are and where we come from – meta­phys­i­cal­ly speak­ing – then what’s the point of it all? Amer­i­can Inte­ri­or is a film about sto­ry­telling as a form of cul­tur­al lifeblood – whether that be through the books, songs, poems, mon­u­ments or just a rough­hewn patch­work of idle conjecture.

Beyond Rhys’ search for Evans, the film even­tu­al­ly reveals itself as a film exam­in­ing the func­tion of sto­ries in wider soci­ety, and that while it may be the gory details that hold our atten­tion, it’s their essence and the process of telling which is most vital – an idea that wends its way right back to the Bible.

Yes, it’s an amus­ing and some­times flip­pant work, but Rhys’ ulti­mate sin­cer­i­ty is nev­er in ques­tion. You watch this delight­ful and fas­ci­nat­ing film with the hope that in 200 years time, the dusty print (or the soiled hard-dri­ve) will be redis­cov­ered in a crum­bling archive and some brave soul will opt to make a movie about Gruff Rhys’ own fool­hardy voy­age into the Amer­i­can interior.