Review: Mainstream Is a Social Media Influencer Satire Past Its Expiration Date

The film has the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize it’s late to the party.

Mainstream
Photo: IFC Films

Frankie (Maya Hawke) is probably someone who might identify as an “old soul,” a detail that Gia Coppola’s Mainstream reinforces by initially narrating her life via silent-movie intertitles. Those intertitles also suggest that Link (Andrew Garfield), an incidental bystander to a video project she’s shooting inside a Los Angeles mall’s forecourt, might be trouble from the moment he takes the head off his mouse costume: Is this “a Prince Charming waiting to be kissed? Or is it a rat?” Frankie is at the mall covertly filming passersby in front of a Kandinsky print that no one can be bothered to notice—her latest, destined-to-go-unheard statement about our perpetually distracted society. Or something to that effect.

With a tendency to obscure a facial scar with her hair, Frankie is a little on the meek side for camera-facing internet fame. She pours drinks at a crappy cabaret-like bar while her videos struggle to break 100 views. Which is to say, she hasn’t really found her voice as a creator yet. But Link, a phone-less, anti-internet rebel, has confidence to spare. At the mall, he foists his costume head and cheese sample platter on Frankie before leaping up to directly engage the crowd, running with her idea as she films; he points out the painting before taking it off the wall, his manic charisma drawing people to him. Soon enough, Frankie and her pining work pal, Jake (Nat Wolff), team up to produce videos that star Link under the moniker “No One Special,” which he uses to extoll the virtues of unplugging from social media.

From this point, Mainstream proceeds as your stock showbiz rise-and-fall narrative, only it’s filled with people who constantly remind you to like, comment, and subscribe at the end of their videos. That is, when it’s not broadcasting prosaic indie quirk (the biggest indignity of Frankie’s job at the bar is when she’s ordered to wear a baby costume because the person who usually wears it didn’t show). Along the way, every point that it makes feels obligatory: how celebrity is a sham, how influencer culture is ripe for exploitation, and how so many problems these days can be traced to the fact that you live on your phone. And in case anyone needs an update on the state of the democratization of social media, the group’s eventual manager (Jason Schwartzman) pejoratively refers to YouTube as “TheirTube.”

Advertisement

But YouTube has been “TheirTube” for so long that Mainstream’s stabs at relevance mostly just date the film. Not only have other platforms like Twitch and TikTok emerged as viable star-making competitors, older social media platforms (including YouTube) have planned, created, and launched their own responses to their competitors. When the production values of the No One Special videos go from the homespun to the polished, indistinguishable from those of your average game show, it scans as nothing more than business as usual. After all, YouTube has long since pivoted away from anything-goes crowdsourcing to maintenance of its most established personalities and brands, as well as personalities that became brands.

You keep waiting for Coppola to introduce a new spin to her material beyond occasionally infusing it with garish internet-video aesthetics. The film proceeds as if where it’s headed isn’t immediately obvious, its quote-unquote “modern” makeover doing little more than reheating the most familiar themes about fame and the media. Link turns out to be a rat much like the intertitles warned he might be, friction between the collaborators grows, and then that friction becomes another potential tool to capture an audience, as shock value and controversy is leveraged for self-serving purposes. To watch all of this play out over the course of even a relatively brief 90 minutes is agonizing for how assured Mainstream is of its own profundity.

The film, co-written by Coppola and Tom Stuart, does get around to addressing the hypocrisy of Link decrying the medium of his success, and it hardly feels like an accident that the interviewer calling him out is played by Johnny Knoxville, who rode the real-life injuries and bodily excretions of Jackass to success in, yes, the mainstream. But that scene arrives a full hour into the film and it’s pitched like the bombshell that it isn’t. Link pivots to embracing grotesque actions and open hostility, and we’re meant to take that as some unforeseen escalation in his attempt to retain an audience rather than the logical next step in a culture where that sort of behavior has been embraced for a decade-plus. It’s even the default mode of the internet, the very medium that Mainstream is commenting on.

Advertisement

When Coppola cast a bunch of famous kids in her superior Palo Alto, they served as a shorthand for layabout wealth. Here, the famous kids play the struggling artists, and one of the whispered, revelatory horrors about Link’s murky past is that he actually has rich parents. Mainstream’s most coherent point is also its most blindingly obvious: that the ways fame and the media amplify terrible human qualities also applies to the internet. The film has all the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize that it’s arrived late to the party, functioning best as a cautionary tale for what happens when our idea of new artistic voices is just the umpteenth generation of wealthy children.

Score: 
 Cast: Andrew Garfield, Maya Hawke, Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman, Alexa Demie, Johnny Knoxville  Director: Gia Coppola  Screenwriter: Gia Coppola, Tom Stuart  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 94 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Soundtrack

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.