Director: Michael Grodner
MPAA Rating: NR
Runtime: 82 Minutes
Documenting a floundering musician who struggles to parse reality from fiction, The Icarus Line Must Die dares to ask the fruitless question of whether a vanity project’s level of interest to the public depends upon the public knowing the famous egotist at its center.
As co-writer, star and head creative force behind the very real band that his film fictionalized, Joe Cardamone has crafted both a virtual send-off to the respected but not exposed band The Icarus Line, which broke up two years prior, and a generational drama about the difficulties of operating in the post-punk Los Angeles scene a decade after its supposed peak in the late ’90s early 2000s.
It is very possible that many will enter into this film in the same position that I did, thinking The Icarus Line was an assumed invention of the film, and honestly that is all for the better because coming to terms with the fact there is a bedrock of reality to Cardamone’s self-aggrandizement and self-pity hidden underneath a thin veil of fiction made the whole exercise more fascinating than it deserved.
Perhaps it is seeing something the filmmakers never intended or were hesitant to broadcast, but existing as it does, as this backhanded compliment, Cardamone pays to himself at the end of his band’s career makes The Icarus Line Must Die a quietly intriguing portrait of a rockstar’s ego-trip at its nadir.
Supposedly inspired by the No Wave Cinema movement of the late 1970s, which emphasized mood and feel above all other concerns, The Icarus Line Must Die is not about much in terms of plot. Cardamone, as our listless protagonist, bums around his usual Los Angeles haunts, shops around an independent album that no publication or record company wants, hobnobs with other notables of the LA underground music scene like Keith Morris of Black Flag and Annie Hardy of Giant Drag, all while contemplating his irrelevance after the recent career setback of The Icarus Line dissolving underneath him.
He’s on financially shaky ground with an unmarketable album and a personal studio where none of the cameoing musicians pay for their session time, and the film never moves past this layer of his chosen story. Outside of a lazily constructed Personal Shopper-esque thriller component, where he routinely receives bizarre, threatening text messages from an unknown number, there is no moving quality to Cardamone’s conflicts, making it easy to mistake this lack of drama for verisimilitude.
Coupled with the intimate, handheld frugality of the presentation, which emphasizes a moody black-and-white photography for aesthetic reasons as much as economic ones, The Icarus Line Must Die feels and acts like a documentary, down to the factual details of Cardamone’s career and a cast of non-acting musicians playing themselves more or less.
With all of the “what is this” out of the way, the “why” of it all is allowed to take center stage and makes a case for this film’s existence. That Joe Cardamone decided at this stage of his career, where he is without the moderately successful band that got him to where he is even allowed to make a film let alone encouraged, to make this fictionalized existential document of his life is deeply fascinating despite its utter mundane qualities.
Even though he lacks the conviction to just have this be a documentary, the film is a telling portrait of his utter egoism and resentment of the music scene he most likely believes owes him a great deal. He fills the film with friends and record executives seemingly to placate his self-worth by ensuring his character’s fictitious record that he wrote and produced all by himself (which we never hear on the soundtrack by the way) is “raw,” “happening” and “the real deal” but also “blatantly noncommercial” and “untouchable” in terms of releasing.
As a writer, star and most likely backseat director to Grodner (who also co-wrote), Cardamone’s fragility is laid bare by accidentally drawing attention to how he is blatantly using fiction as a coping mechanism not only for the loss of his band but also for his inability to come to terms with his own disappointing amount of fame. Cardamone is no actor and, despite a rousing performance of “Don’t Let Me Save Your Soul” at the film’s close, clearly has no presence in front of the camera, struggling to act naturally in scenarios he personally wrote.
Far from being a knock against the film, it adds to the charm of Icarus Line being an ill-conceived vanity project and lo-fi independent exercise made with whatever friend would agree to appear on camera with him. As an awkward Nick Cave-like figure rigidly going through the motions of his drama, the utter inexperience of No Wave Cinema style is taken up earnestly by the young rocker and his ego-trip, and it’s this frank humbleness of means that saves the film from disaster.
Cardamone is not only in over his head when it comes to transcribing his life into presentable drama, which the poorly executed stalker subplot makes abundantly clear, but he is also deeply unsure of (or more believably in denial over) what that life even is. The film ends with a contrived, feel-good Hollywood episode – where the reunion of his band to play one last show gets him the attention of a record exec who, in turn, picks up this mythic album he has been clutching onto – and you cannot help but feel something for this guy.
The post-punk nihilism slips in these moments so that Cardamone exposes more about his true feelings than the fictionalized version of himself intends, and for better or worse, that is interesting. In addition to the shaky veracity he struggles to dance around, the film also has a solid soundtrack and some striking cinematography, so perhaps that is enough to justify indulging a post-punker writing his own happy ending after reality dealt him a bad hand.
Like most No Wave films, however, it is not necessarily what is on screen that will make you invested but the all-too-clear production details lingering just beneath the poor dramatizations that elevate the film to something more than its means.
