Harmony Korine burst onto the independent film scene in the late '90s as the twentysomething enfant terrible who wrote the screenplay to the controversial "Kids" and went on to direct the purposefully modulated provocations "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy." Then he seemed to vanish into a cloud of drug rumors, transient living and alleged projects.
It was as if he had come to destroy cinema, and in the process nearly killed himself.
After an eight-year absence, he's reemerged with a new film, "Mister Lonely," which last year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is set to open in New York on Friday and Los Angeles on May 9. Full of quiet grace and spiritual transcendence, "Mister Lonely" seems far removed from the carefully calibrated grotesqueries of Korine's earlier work.
He is, in many respects, a changed man, if not a more conventional filmmaker. Korine, 35, lives in Nashville, where he grew up, with his wife. In the last decade, he says that he's worked as a lifeguard and bricklayer, lived through two house fires and spent time in Paris and with a Haitian voodoo tap-dancer in Baton Rouge, La., and also with a cult of fishermen in Peru.
It sounds like some scruffy art-rock rendering of Mark Twain, but are his journeys fact or some allegorical reimagining of years of drug addiction and emotional malaise? "What's the difference?" he said. "Whether you believe me or whether it's the truth, what does it matter? Everything's just a story. It's all a story."
New direction
Onetime poster boy for New York's art-fashion-music-film nighttime demimonde, Korine couldn't help but have a chuckle at finding himself on a recent Sunday at a sun-dappled table poolside at a hotel in Beverly Hills, munching on French fries and gulping coffee.
The setting does seem a far cry from the underworld phantasmagoria he explored in his earlier films -- out-of- control teenagers in "Kids," Rust Belt glue-sniffers in "Gummo" and the boundaries of mental illness in "Julien Donkey-Boy."
Taking a different tack, the Paris-set "Mister Lonely" follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who is befriended by a woman who dresses as Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton). She invites him to live among a commune of celebrity impersonators in the Scottish Highlands.
In an unconnected parallel story, nuns in Panama discover they can skydive without parachutes and land unharmed.
