Kidstuff

Don McKellar plays Rick, a limo driver/wannabe director in Childstar. Courtesy TVA Films

Don McKellar has a persona, which is, if you think about it, a unique quality in a Canadian celebrity. Most of our stars – the Gordon Pinsents, the Molly Parkers, the Peter Mansbridges – are defined by their approachability, their every-man- or woman-ness. Don McKellar isn’t unapproachable, exactly, but his persona is an unusually intense one. One senses that if approached, he could be demanding, though probably entertaining in the way that neurotics, as one of their more loveable symptoms, will play up their neuroses for laughs.

When acting in other people’s films like Exotica or The Red Violin (which he co-wrote), McKellar is often a little bemused and charmingly self-loathing, whether the character is or not. When I first saw him in the punk road movie Highway 61 14 years ago, I thought: Whoa. Who is this attractive homunculus with the wandering eye? Even in “straight” roles, like the miniseries Trudeau, McKellar does a slight Woody Allen thing: the shuffle and stutter that fronts a healthy confidence. In his own projects – the apocalyptic Last Night; the slacker television series Twitch City – he is less cute, and much grimmer, as if yearning to communicate something serious from within the walls of the comedy he builds so easily.

And so it is with Childstar, McKellar’s second feature as (co-)writer, director and star, a film that understands, and utilizes, his persona perfectly. In fact, it makes fun of it, and the whole absurd project of commercial filmmaking. McKellar plays Rick, a not-so-young-anymore limo driver and wannabe director who keeps his camera and tripod in the trunk so that he can hop out and capture a bleak landscape at any moment. His most recent opus is shot entirely in Euro art house black-and-white and appears to be an ode to death. Naturally, it’s titled The Stupidity of God.

Hence, when Rick is called upon to chauffeur teen star Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), he is oblivious to the power implicit in the kid’s three-tiered name – the worldwide sign for “cute boy” – and only vaguely aware of Taylor’s hit sitcom Family Affairs (in which dad is played by the world’s snuggliest, knowingest patriarch, Alan Thicke). Rick instantly takes to the kid’s mom, Suzanne (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a possibly stoned, savagely ambitious stage monster who beds the driver presumably just to stave off the boredom of waiting around on set.

Twelve-year-old Taylor has been sent from L.A. to the Siberia of Toronto for a quickie shoot before the unflattering onset of puberty erodes his fan base. (Even though Childstar is a slick, handsome film, McKellar, as usual, makes Toronto look industrial and unwelcoming: more self-loathing?). Taylor’s film is The First Son, a cheap action movie about a teen saving his dad, the American President, from terrorists. That two actual movies about dedicated first daughters were released in the past year suggests McKellar is on to something. Hollywood’s shiny packaging of “family values” is all the more unconvincing when it becomes clear that Taylor is a mess, an indulged, undergrown prima donna caught in the crossfire of his parents’ bitter divorce. (In a very funny cameo, Eric Stoltz plays his shaggy California father. He’s using Taylor’s money to finance “the band.”)

Precocious kid actor Taylor Brandon Burns (played by Mark Rendall) trips the light fantastic in Childstar. Courtesy TVA Films

Rick’s life is a mess, too – cameras share space in the limo with the boxes his wife let him take when she kicked him out – but relative to the movie executive vipers circling the baby star, he’s healthy, and soon Suzanne signs over guardianship to the limo driver. But Taylor is led astray by a substance-happy former child star (Brendan Fehr) with a habit bigger than a fat nun’s. It’s funny to see drunken Taylor shaking his skinny boy body on the dance floor with a pretty “actress/model” a decade older (the lovely Kristin Adams, from Falling Angels), and disturbing, too. One recalls the famous paparazzi photos of bleary-eyed Drew Barrymore tanked to the gills and hitting the clubs at 12, all pubescent pudge and bad judgment.

Clearly, Childstar has something more meaningful to say than Dickie Roberts about the ugliness of kiddie stardom, otherwise Alan Thicke would have gone an entire lifetime without delivering the line: “Child stars are the sacrificial lambs of America suffering for our sins.” Fair enough: what’s not repulsive about the endless pop culture parade of mini-mes sent forth to mouth our fashionable notions of sassy adolescence then disposed of with the emergence of a single zit?

And yet, this side of the film never quite gels with McKellar’s comedic instincts. Rick and Taylor have to matter to one another to make their mutual redemptions believable, but they don’t appear invested in much but themselves. Taylor is fatally unlikable: he runs away, leaving the film production orphaned, and at one point, he nearly smashes someone’s skull. McKellar is trying to go oversize here, upping the stakes to remake the film in its final act as a surreal noir of the kind Rick might shoot in earnest black-and-white. The thing is, McKellar is not Rick, thank God. Childstar, like so much of what he does, is unabashedly populist, accessible and funny, even when dealing with a tired subject for satire, like the film industry.

Making fun of moviemaking has been overdone since The Player (does anyone really want to pull back the curtain on stardom? The curtain’s the fun!), but McKellar does something fresh, drawing laughs from the weird outsider sensation that occurs on home turf when Canadians make American films. At one point, as Taylor leads his blonde conquest through the set of the White House, asking her whether she’d prefer to have sex in the Lincoln Bedroom or the Blue Room, she says: “It’s your fantasy. I’m Canadian.” McKellar writes great movie dialogue, precise and surprising. Funny doesn’t have to be the end of it, and no one should ask McKellar to check his depth. But somehow, he needs to find a way to make the deep meaning as palatable as the surface laughter. Over and over in his still youthful career (he’s just 41), he’s shown us that he’s more than capable of greatness. It’s approachable, even if he – and we’re grateful for this – is not.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.