Taurus will be many people’s idea of ​​hell – a portrait of narcissism, alienation and burnout in the LA music industry, directed by and featuring people who experience life, with very little interest in making it palatable. It has a lead character you might want to see squashed: a payoff the film provides almost one night, when the Human Disaster Zone Cole, played in a borderline self-portrait by rapper Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly), stumbles upon to a busy boulevard (Sunset?). He just drank way too much cocaine at a strip club and lies down laughing as he honks furiously as cars swerve to avoid him.

Like so much else in this bizarrely compelling film, it’s a technically sound sequence, capturing the sensory haziness of drug addiction with reckless neon streaks and crisp sound, like the best kind of headache I’ve ever had. ‘Harmony Korine or Larry Clark put on the screen.

Scene by scene, the film makes photographic choices that shouldn’t work, but oddly, and have a heaviness that’s certainly self-aware. At the start and end, director Tim Sutton flips the camera 180°, turning Cole’s world upside down to match the kind of stuff he writes in his lyrics. Maybe the film rates them a lot more than I do, and his overall level of creativity, but his form is clearly in tune with the man at its center, and that’s what matters.

Baker can be deeply frustrating to watch here, especially at the start, when Cole is seen playing the grand piano in his private recording studio, so obscured by his disheveled blonde locks that we barely see his face for 10 minutes. . Baker and Sutton have presumably seen Gus Van Sant’s portrayal of Kurt Cobain in Last Days (2005) and want a bit of that zoned insignificance. They fail to pass off Cole as a tragic genius of any kind, but that’s beside the point: instead, he’s just another stalled product, victim of his own hype. , an overpaid drifter with no respect for himself, his own theoretical talent, or anyone else on screen.

When he’s not wasting his time unnecessarily high, he’s wasting it on himself, in meetings with executives where the camera doesn’t even show them, just letting their muffled voices chatter away while Cole looks off at him up close- UPS . These are Baker’s best funniest moments. You don’t necessarily walk out of this movie wanting to see him play again, but that’s partly because he scratched his personality with all his charm to commit to it.

The only nuance here comes from the surrounding characters who were drawn into the care in spite of themselves. Fellow rapper Lil Tjay has a big scene doing a studio collaboration, where his far greater talent and humility are challenges for Cole to shape up, to deserve to be a movie’s lead character here.

Then again, if Cole was nicer, or somehow a more talented or interesting person, would the movie really be superior? Like with Simon Rex in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, I’m not convinced that’s the case. Megan TBEN, Baker’s real-life fiancée, appears briefly as Cole’s ex: they have a big argument that unfolds inaudibly through the studio window, while we hear two other characters talk lazily about their love lives. . It’s clear from these scenes, and the briefs with Cole’s young daughter, that the film simply doesn’t care to expand on the various dramas of her existence. It keeps him ostensibly aloof – as bored as he is bored of himself.

Still, he’s a human being, and I was surprised how gutting a man like that triggered real emotion at the end. Maddie Hasson gives a perfect and needed performance as a long-suffering PA, the closest thing to a sympathy surrogate we get.

Sutton will hopefully land on less insular topics, but there’s something almost heroically mundane about the trajectory he and Baker have found for Cole here. His story, if it can even be called that, is page six gossip fodder with haters out in force in the comment fields. I thought I hated it myself, until it started to feel deeply believable.

Cert TBC, 104 min. UK version to be confirmed