Sean Penn barely resembles himself in This Must Be the Place. As Cheyenne, a retired goth rock star hiding out in Dublin, he wears smudged eyeliner, a teased mop of hair and the flattened, half whispered voice of someone who quit performing decades ago. When his estranged father dies, Cheyenne flies back to New York and quietly takes up a search his father never finished, tracking down the former camp guard who tormented him.
It was Paolo Sorrentino's first film in English, made not long after Il Divo put him on the international map, and the same restless camera and offbeat comic timing are here, just pointed at diners and empty American highways instead of Roman politics.
The title is not just a mood. It comes straight from the Talking Heads song This Must Be the Place, and rather than simply license the tune, Sorrentino brought David Byrne on to write the film's original score. Byrne also appears onscreen playing himself, performing the song live in one of the film's odder, more tender detours, so the music that named the movie ends up woven through it instead of just quoted.
Frances McDormand plays Jane, Cheyenne's wife and one of the only people who sees past the makeup. Their scenes together are some of the warmest stretches in a film that otherwise keeps drifting further from home.
This Must Be the Place holds a 66 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the split is easy to see. Penn's performance is mesmerizing and quietly moving for long stretches, and there are moments when the wig and the voice threaten to swallow the actor whole. It has divided audiences since it premiered in competition at Cannes, and that division is part of its appeal.
Fifteen years on, it still plays like one of the stranger swings of Penn's career and one of Sorrentino's most personal detours, a film about grief and inheritance dressed up as a road movie. Worth revisiting for the parts that divided people as much as the parts everyone agreed on.
