The Nowhere Inn

Arti­fice is not a usu­al­ly desired com­po­nent for an artist’s doc­u­men­tary, but in the case of The Nowhere Inn it is entire­ly inten­tion­al. First-time film­mak­er Bill Benz presents a metafic­tion­al mock­u­men­tary, con­cert film, and psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller writ­ten by real-life friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors Annie Clark (bet­ter known by her stage name St Vin­cent) and Car­rie Brown­stein, who play fic­tion­al, satirised ver­sions of themselves.

Clark invites Brown­stein on the road to direct a raw, behind-the-scenes van­i­ty film chron­i­cling the tour­ing of her Gram­my-win­ning album ​‘Masse­duc­tion’. Instead, what unfurls is the grad­ual break­down of a friend­ship as their cre­ative direc­tion diverges across this album/​film/​tour trip­tych. The Nowhere Inn is fan ser­vice in the most St Vin­cent of ways: solid­i­fy­ing her mys­te­ri­ous image as a queer women’s deity, bar­ing every­thing and reveal­ing noth­ing at all.

Night­ly meta­mor­pho­sis sees Clark shed her tour bus blan­ket chrysalis and emerge as St Vin­cent – the latex-clad, lip­stick smudged, gui­tar man­han­dling rock­star. Benz lens­es this trans­for­ma­tion in deep rouge tones, paired with, as to be expect­ed, a fan­tas­tic St Vin­cent sound­track. Brown­stein craves such imagery, yet all her doc seems to cap­ture is a jar­ring jux­ta­po­si­tion con­sist­ing of the self-effac­ing Clark being elat­ed at a Scrab­ble dou­ble word score. This dis­so­nance expos­es cracks in their rela­tion­ship, as the pair come to regard each oth­er as direc­tor and subject.

While recent soul-bear­ing artist doc­u­men­taries (see: Bil­lie Eil­ish: The World’s a Lit­tle Blur­ry, Tay­lor Swift: Miss Amer­i­cana and The Sparks Broth­ers) have gazed inwards, The Nowhere Inn has no inter­est in play­ing by con­ven­tion­al rules. Instead, Clark and Brown­stein have pro­duced an exten­sion of St Vincent’s per­sona, with her sleek aes­thet­ic seep­ing into the film’s kalei­do­scope, psy­che­del­ic visu­als. With each new track, Clark and Brownstein’s iden­ti­ties blur as they repeat­ed­ly turn the spot­light onto each other.

In the open­ing scene, the limo par­ti­tion rolls down for the dri­ver to ques­tion Clark on who she is and ask her to sing one of her songs (he doesn’t know any). ​“Don’t wor­ry, we’ll find out who you are,” he tells her. It’s a promise The Nowhere Inn has no real inten­tion of ful­fill­ing. The film effec­tive­ly clos­es the ​‘Masse­duc­tion’ chap­ter of St Vincent’s career, giv­ing way to her lat­est album, ​‘Daddy’s Home’, a per­son­al explo­ration of her father’s incarceration.