Who Is KK Downey? (2008) 2.5/4

The thing about hipster-dom is that any attempt to out-hipster the hipsters still leaves one a hipster. Rebelling against hipster trends is precisely what a hipster would do. Indulging in hipster trends is also precisely what a hipster would do. It's a perverse trap. A trap Who Is KK Downey? both satirizes and is caught in.

Who Is KK Downey? is about two upper-middle class young slackers who are trying to become artists. The drug-using and hard-partying Terry wants to be a punk rock star; Theo Huxtable (no, not that Theo Huxtable; this one is a chubby, blond, white guy) wants to write a brutal, sex-filled, neorealist novel. They combine their talents, creating a hard-lived fictional author of Theo's book, the enigmatic KK Downey. KK is the ultimate hipster, appealing to all the 'scenesters', launching the book to A Million Little Pieces-style fame, except with underground credibility. (Think Harmony Korine with Oprah Book Club support.) The new fame and fortune naturally has adverse affects on our protagonists.

There's a subplot involving Terry's archnemesis, the cultural elite hipster Connor......... Rooney. He's so pretentious he insists on the pause. His profession is rock critic and possibly douchebag, although he's so extreme a douchebag he becomes a sympathetic character: this is a guy who masturbates to pictures of Enlightenment authors. Not only that, but despite being a douchebag, he's the only guy to correctly realize KK Downey is a phony. He may be an envious, narcissistic hipster, but he's right. And if there's anything to be learned from the existence of people like Dale Peck, it's that even tenth-rate human beings can sometimes be right.

The writers, Darren Curtis, Matt Silver, and Pat Kiely, (who incidentally also play Terry, Theo, and Rooney respectively--plus Kiely and Curtis direct) have a few targets for their satire. Hipsters and the publishing industry are the main targets. As a satire of the publishing industry, it's a bit contrived. I think they overestimate the influence and power of the literary world. They get the notion of the author as commodity right, but that's not really new. The commodity is for the hipsters and that's where the satires works best. These young authors clearly know their scenes well, because they have some stingingly clever scenes at hipster expense. These moments of high-brow humour were the most successful in the film and got the most laughs out of me. There are occasional minor targets as well. Downey's appearance is, oddly enough, nearly identical to Karen Black's disguise in Family Plot. This feminine appearance allows the writers to pick on gender theorists too.

Most of the lower-brow humour falls flat. Not because it's low-brow, but rather through a lack of ambition. If you're going to do low-brow, go over-the-top. Sometimes they did and then it was very funny. But for the most part they seemed to think a fellatio reference would be sufficient. It's not.

There are also many scenes where it appears the writer-directors weren't sure whether they wanted serious or humourous. The result is that I couldn't take these scenes seriously, but they didn't make me laugh either. There are even humourous scenes that should be taken seriously to work, but the implausibly artificial characters (Rooney sports a pompadour and speaks like Ian Buchanan) detract from the needed reality. Satire requires an anchor, or it loses conviction; this film needed more anchorage.

There's a moment when the Theo character interrupts an opera to discuss a business deal with his agent and introduces KK Downey. This is really what the film is all about: the commodification of art interrupting the enjoyment of art. On another level, it's about the enjoyment of art interrupting the enjoyment of life, normal, mundane life. A hipster comedy that offers a triumphant affirmation of bourgeois humanism? That's hitting the right Marx. So quit Stallin and go rent Who Is KK Downey? It's far from perfect, but it's a truly independent anglophone picture from Quebec that is witty, stylish, and offers a charmingly human story.