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Carrie Brownstein and St. Vincent's first collaboration since the new Sleater-Kinney album isn't more music but a niche meta-mockumentary.
Last weekend, The Nowhere Inn, a movie co-starring and co-written by the pair, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The absurd comedy follows Brownstein’s quest to document St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, on tour—a fictional documentary within a fictional documentary.
It’s already been besieged by Portlandia comparisons: Variety described the film as a “comedy of awkwardness,” while Indiewire wrote that the movie “dips into the deadpan folksy satire of Brownstein’s Portlandia before veering into a shapeshifting psychological thriller worthy of vintage De Palma.”
Related: How Perceptions of Portlandia Have Changed Over the Years
In the movie, Brownstein realizes that behind her onstage persona, Clark is aggressively normal and kind of boring.
Brownstein asks Clark to pretend to be more interesting for the camera, setting off a series of increasingly strange and narcissistic antics. That includes Clark deciding to show off her home state of Texas by shooting pistols and wearing a skin-tight, fringed outfit, and later demanding that Brownstein film some staged intimacy with Clark and her onscreen girlfriend, Dakota Johnson, who wears a St. Vincent look-a-like wig.
Brownstein and St. Vincent have collaborated several times before. Clark produced Sleater-Kinney's new album The Center Won't Hold and plays herself in a handful of Portlandia sketches. And while The Nowhere Inn is Clark's first screenplay credit, she's dabbled in deadpan absurdism before.
Bill Benz, The Nowhere Inn's real-life director, previously worked on Portlandia and The Kroll Show.
The Nowhere Inn will screen at SXSW in March. No word yet on a theatrical release, or whether or not the movie will make it to Portland.
Related: On Their New Album, Sleater-Kinney Faces Political Turmoil and Intraband Uncertainty.