Critic Reviews

At times a bit too enamored of these loose conceits, The Nowhere Inn sometimes registers as a cheap fuck-with-the-audience provocation that might have been better suited for a viral short (or several), but at its finest moments the movie conjures a singular vision steeped in zaniness, but not devoid of purpose.

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.

While St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn is not the standard performative music documentary, it opens a window to her soul that many are never able to give away so freely in front of the camera.

Director Bill Benz (best known for episodes of Portlandia), Clark, and Brownstein have a good deal of fun playing the business side of show business—the documentary filmmaker trying to find a unique angle between concert footage, or the star having to take mundane questions from the press in each city she visits on tour. It both documents an identify crisis and doesn’t.

The Nowhere Inn deeply explores the dynamic between performer and audience and performer with self. It does so in a way I’ve never seen before. It has so many layers that at some point, you get lost in the thick of it, but in a good way.

The Nowhere Inn is simultaneously satire and fan service, frothy fun and pretentious nonsense, depending on what the viewer wants it to be.

Layered storytelling that tests the limits of the screen and the fourth wall allows for Clark and Brownstein to play at playing themselves, making for a sharp, comedic commentary on the way fame complicates identity.

Outside its value as a cautionary tale about introducing a power dynamic into a friendship between former equals, there’s an emptiness at the heart of The Nowhere Inn which might be part of the point (ah, the vacuity of celebrity! the hollowness of fame!) but the observation of emptiness is not the same as actual substance.

Never consistently funny enough to work as straight comedy and too broad to succeed in its somber aspirations, the results are still engaging in their attempts to defy easy categorization. Like St. Vincent herself, The Nowhere Inn keeps morphing into something else.

The film, directed by Portlandia helmer Bill Benz, is too much of a hodge-podge for its own good.