“For all Intents and purposes, this film isn’t a comedy, although I’m sure it will be put in that box,” director Rick Alverson says over the phone from his home in Virginia. “Entertainment,” which opens in New York on November 13, stars Gregg Turkington—known for his two-decade-plus stint as the comic persona Neil Hamburger—and the only laughs the film elicits, from a non-sociopathic viewer at least, are nervous ones.The original conversations about the film, Alverson says, involved inserting Turkington’s character into a road-trip narrative (not unlike that of 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop), a concept that was eventually abandoned (“We didn’t have any interest in a promotional vehicle for a comic character,” the director says). Alverson and Turkington have a shared aversion to narrative clichés, a disgust with metaphors and symbolism and easy digestion. But at the same time, Alverson admits, those occasionally tired things are what constitute a shared cinematic language. Counterintuitively, director and actor embraced loaded clichés as raw material: a set of access points for the viewer that, Alverson says with a laugh, is “essentially a trap.”So in “Entertainment” we find Turkington’s unnamed character roaming the California desert, occasionally accompanied by a scatologically obsessed mime named Eddie (played by Tye Sheridan), who serves as his opening act. When our antihero is not performing, he’s sitting in his hotel room crying into his daughter’s voice mail. The slowness and repetition of the scenes, with little narrative closure in sight, generates a certain amount of fatigue for the viewer, as Alverson takes a familiar premise—a man in search of something in the desert—and pushes it as far as it can go.“What Turkington does as a performer has to do with the end of something,” Alverson says. “I think it’s about exhaustion.” He notes that his previous film, “The Comedy”—also not what its title suggests—was engaged in a similar “cat-and-mouse game of attraction and repulsion.” I asked Alverson—a former musician who, in the past, toured with the indie bands Drunk and Spokane—if “Entertainment” was also about his own attraction to and repulsion by the act of performance. “It’s probably so close to the surface I don’t even realize it,” he says, laughing. “But there’s a reason in the film why the audience loves the opening act, Eddie, who shits into his hat. I think it’s pretty straightforward.”
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