Rick Alverson’s Entertainment is a film that is sure to divide viewers. Its nameless antihero (Gregg Turkington) is a character that will turn off many viewers. However, if you’re like me, a lover of mutts and misfits, you will find him to be a sympathetic character whose loneliness and sadness affects you.

Entertainment is an anti-road trip story about The Comedian (Turkington), who travels the lonely roads of the Mojave Desert in California performing his comedy act in depressing venues, including a prison, a roadside show, and dive bars. The story is an anti-road trip one because he loses himself instead of finds himself on the trip.

The Comedian’s only companion is Eddie (Tye Sheridan), a young man who performs…

37/100

Considering my fondness for Rick Alverson's The Comedy, I was disappointed by the rampant art-house cliches and plodding uneasiness of Entertainment; a particularly unsympathetic montage of a circular lifestyle and the light that rotates around an endless vacuum of nothing. To be honest, I was never drawn into the life of Gregg Turkington's "successful" portrayal of a nameless comedian. I didn't feel for him. I didn't care about him. I didn't even pity him. And while such an annoying and infuriating character should be interesting at the very least, he wasn't. Alverson is trying to say *something* here about the cost of low-life fame not discovered and the expense of ego within an empty body of flesh, but it…

We are in the mojave. The light is washed out, desaturated to the point of turning Greg Turknington white like a ghost. Wind chimes play crystal tunes and hang somewhere just off screen. The stage is set and Neil Hamburger walks out.

Comedians set off into the desert to make art. I love this group of filmmakers. Pushing comedy past the point of being funny. This movie has no place being called a dark comedy. Black comedy doesn't even really get there. The setting should give you a good visual of the tone. Sparse. Outlook on life for this traveling comedian isn't looking great. We follow him on a slow path across the west into Los Angeles. Swinging into dive…