Frank

A fictionalised account of indeed, a real person, Frank is a film ultimately about creativity: how we desire it; how, in its purest form, it feels unattainable; and importantly, how the search for creativity has motives which can define its long-term winners and losers.

Michael Fassbender stars as the film's surreal title character – a man, for the majority of the film, who stays obstructed within a giant cartoon head-mask. Frank is the vocalist for a band of incongruous outsiders (with an unpronounceable band name), who one day are joined by amateur keyboard player, and aspiring creative, Jon (Domhnall Gleeson).

The head, which is inarguably a very symbolic trait, is an interesting device. Having the same, bold intentions as the film's blank slate title, the head allows Frank to encompass all the enigma of unattainable creativity; it keeps him and his talent at arm's length from the desperate Jon. Frank is aloof and divine, tantalisingly unknowable. In his desperate quest to be Frank, Jon turns from affable audience conduit, to the band's Yoko Ono, a bitter Nick Carraway whose motivations reveal (never to him, interestingly) a disingenuousness that leads to both his and Frank's downfall.

Ultimately, Frank is revealed as the natural creative where Jon most definitely is not. Frank's not who he is by divine right, or by having pushed himself through some extended phase of suffering; he's there, as it's put at the film's very end, “because he was always quite good at music”.