Entertainment

[projekktor id=’21904′]

Entertainment is a dark comedy written and directed by Rick Alverson (The Comedy). The film stars Gregg Turkington, Tye Sheridan, John C. Reilly, Michael Cera, and Amy Seimetz.

A broken, aging comedian tours the California desert, lost in a cycle of third-rate venues, novelty tourist attractions, and vain attempts to reach his estranged daughter. By day, he slogs through the barren landscape, inadvertently alienating every acquaintance. At night, he seeks solace in the animation of his onstage persona. Fueled by the promise of a lucrative Hollywood engagement, he trudges through a series of increasingly surreal and volatile encounters. In Alverson’s hallucinatory fugue, Gregg Turkington stars as The Comedian, caught in a struggle between being the center of attention and the object of alienation, occasionally challenged by an unexpected cast of characters.

“The Comedian is based on a character Gregg has been honing for 20 years,” says Alverson. “In the film he is a kind of man out of time, a frail character that we’ve tried to turn into an everyman, or a negative space or blank slate. There is this exhaustion about the character that really attracts me, because it suggests the end of something — a last gasp of this onstage persona.

Entertainment is rated 14A.