I’m not quite sure that the movie “Frank” is about any one thing, in particular. It engages with a lot of ideas that struggling and aspiring musicians deal with, such as inherent genius, hard work, tragic beginnings, and what it takes to be creatively successful, but it doesn’t have anything specific to say about any of them. Unlike most films, though, Frank doesn’t suffer from its shotgun approach to the complexities of the creative process. Instead it feels like an artist venting about said frustrations through a quirky, compelling yarn centered around a man in a paper mache mask.
Despite the marketing focus on Frank (the masked man) himself, the protagonist of the film is actually Domhnall Gleason’s Jon Burroughs, a struggling keyboardist who lives with his parents and spends much of his free time “writing music,” or more accurately, people-watching on the beaches of Ireland. The film’s first act is strangely similar to another Domhnall Gleason movie, actually; like in Ex Machina, his every-man character is swept away to a remote location with a genius figure who hand-picked him as a collaborator. From there, though, Frank takes a much different path.