The road of excess emphatically does not lead to the palace of wisdom in Taurus, writer-director Tim Sutton’s stylish but ultimately insubstantial portrait of a druggy Hollywood rock star in self-destructive freefall. Rap-rock musician turned actor Colson Baker, aka Machine Gun Kelly, gives an engagingly frazzled lead performance as a slightly more wasted, incoherent version of his true self. To his credit, Baker fully commits to an unflattering role that largely plays on the monstrous egotism associated with the dark side of pop fame.
World premiered in Berlin earlier this week, Taurus is an ambitious misfire that promises more that it delivers. Even so, Baker’s musical fan-base plus a striking cameo by his real-world fiancee, screen queen Megan Fox (Transfomers), should help boost the film’s otherwise skimpy commercial prospects.
Baker, whose previous screen credits include his solid turn as Tommy Lee in Netfix’s Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt (2019), stars as Cole, a successful rock-rap star with a major drug habit, a fancy rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and a daughter who he barely sees. This is a persuasively rounded performance in a role that could have been a one-note caricature. But the main acting honours in Taurus belong to Maddie Hasson as Cole’s long-suffering personal assistant Ilana, the infinitely patient babysitter to his childish whims and explosive tantrums. Hassan is quietly terrific, anchoring the film’s often wayward, lurid tone in emotional realism.
Sutton opens Taurus with a macabre family murder only tenuously linked to the main story, a largely gratuitous shock gesture that never quite justifies its inclusion here. The rest of the episodic plot follows Cole through several hazy days of recording and partying with musician friends, drug dealers, call girls, groupies and thinly drawn music industry parasites. Sutton knowingly blurs the line between the real Baker and his semi-fictional alter ego here, incorporating various true background elements, including some superbly filmed live performance footage of a Machine Gun Kelly show.
With his androgynous good looks, drugged-out vacancy and tousled mop of peroxide hair, Baker seems to be channelling Kurt Cobain for much of Taurus, a doomy parallel that may be intentional. There are certainly faint echoes here of Gus Van Sant’s oblique late-period Cobain biopic Last Days (2005), along with other crash-and-burn rock films. The scene in which a heavily intoxicated Cole nods off in his swimming pool feels like a sly homage to a famously hilarious interview with WASP guitarist Chris Holmes in the iconic Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988). If this is deliberate, then respect to Sutton for throwing subtly satirical shade in a film that otherwise spends too much time indulging spurious myths about hedonistic rockers as messianic visionaries.
Cole’s lucky crystal, which he carries around as a talisman, is another detail taken from Baker’s real life, and provides the pay-off to one of the film’s best jokes. In another stand-out comic scene, Megan Fox makes a wordless cameo appearance, confronting Cole behind soundproofed glass in a recording studio. Escalating from affectionate body language to flailing anger, this authentic-looking exchange was triggered by Fox privately airing some genuine prickly issues between the pair, which is taking Method acting to a whole new level of meta. More of these witty little flourishes might have made a more engaging film, but there is little evidence elsewhere that Sutton is fully in control of such serendiptous tonal swerves.
As a seratonin-pumped depiction of sensory derangement, Taurus is never boring. The stoned, sun-drenched beauty of John Brawley’s cinematography, glazed in psychedelic lens flare, tilting upside down in places, serves as effective visual metaphor for Cole’s mentally scrambled state. The score is provided by Baker himself, drawing on a single marathon song composed while, by his own admission, high on various substances. This is a film with deep intentions but hidden shallows. Crucially, Sutton and Baker never seem to fully grasp just how tedious hanging out with drug casualties can be, even when they are rich and famous.
Director, screenwriter: Tim Sutton
Cast: Colson Baker, Maddie Hasson, Scott McNairy, Naomi Wild, Ruby Rose, Lil Tjay, Megan Fox, Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr.
Cinematography: John Brawley
Editing: Holle Singer
Music: Machine Gun Kelly
Producers: Jib Polhemus, Rob Paris, Mike Witherill
Production companies: Rivulet Films (US), Source Management & Production (US)
World sales: Anonymous Content, New York / Paradigm, LA
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Panorama)
In English
98 minutes