Mike Ott’s second feature film, Kid Icarus , a documentary he co-directed with Carl Bird McLaughlin profiling the production of a student film by 18-year-old Leigh, opens with a confession that pits their protagonist contradictory to the titular myth:
I guess I’m trying to be something that I’m not and I can’t face the fact that I’m not what I want to be. Truth is, I don’t know what I want to be. I want to be a filmmaker, but I don’t know what I personally want to be.
California Dreaming
Like Mike Borchardt, the hero of Chris Smith’s American Movie (this film’s obvious kinfolk), Leigh is a dreamer, fashioning himself the next Steven Spielberg. Unlike Borchardt, Leigh is a film student in Los Angeles, where filmmaking and stardom can seem like an obvious route to being something for those who are nothing. This drive to make it in Hollywood is also the overriding plot of Ott’s most recent film, California Dreams , which not so incidentally features a sly cameo from Borchardt. More pointedly, both films are bite-sized chronicles of young American losers.
As one can infer from his flip floppy opening self-diagnosis, Leigh doesn’t actually want to be a filmmaker. He doesn’t actually care about film as an art or filmmaking as a practice. Ott, who shows up a few times as Leigh’s real-life film school teacher, cuts himself in arguing with Leigh over the student’s unwillingness to do class readings, and later, Leigh wants to slack off during the editing process to go watch Smallville despite being in a time crunch. When his rough cut turns out incomprehensible, narratively and technically, he’s sheepish, reluctant to take responsibility.
So, the central question of Kid Icarus becomes: Why does Leigh want so badly to become a filmmaker?
Why Filmmaking?
His primary influences are the aforementioned Steven Spielberg, repeated ad nauseam, and David Fincher’s Fight Club , both of which can symptomize a lack of enthusiasm, grabbing lazily for the closest name and most zeitgeisty title for his milieu. At one (hilarious) point, Leigh even uses Spielberg as an excuse to be a lazy filmmaker. When he shows up to the set of his film, Enslavence , without a script, he rationalizes it by relaying lore that Spielberg and his Schindler’s List Director of Photography, Janusz Kaminski, shot much of the Best Picture-winner improvisationally.
The plot elements of Enslavence make up a nearly comprehensive list of the all-time hackneyed offenses: rape, drug use, imaginary characters, serial killing. When tested on the motivation behind any of them, he buckles, unable to offer any sensible, or importantly, enthusiastic defense.
The one aspect of filmmaking Leigh does seem particularly concerned with is the contracts, never hesitating to make any new cast or crew member sign a stack of documents drawn up by his lawyer cousin. These documents keep Leigh from being liable should anything happen to a crew member, but Leigh is quicker to stress that these contracts give him sole rights of the film should he go on to distribute Enslavence down the line — something he repeatedly says he plans to do.
But perhaps having official paperwork plays such a prominently role because it is something done well, and done professionally. Leigh also relishes the toast of champagne he pours for his crew on Day 1 — something he saw Spielberg do, of course — which I assume Ott and McLaughlin include to portray his posturing. He loves being in charge, being the voice in the room, and being a director automatically puts him in that place of authority that assumes he’s sure of himself and what he’s doing, but beyond posturing, Leigh has no place being a filmmaker.
In Dialogue with American Movie
Borchardt continues to be usefully diametrical to Leigh; he cared deeply about filmmaking, obsessing over set details, performances and mise-en-scene. His tragedy is a more apt comparison to Icarus; it’s not for lack of caring or trying that Borchardt wasn’t a successful filmmaker. Leigh, however, is using filmmaking as a pretense for what Ott and McLaughlin suggest is a lack of ambition or propensity to do something with his life.
Ostensibly, this is something poignant and worth examining because Leigh, like so many Americans, attach themselves to popular ideas as a shortcut to finding some sort of revelatory self-worth or self-ideation. This point of view comes through in Kid Icarus , and is quite entertaining in the meantime, but I can’t help but be nagged with the lack of stakes considering Leigh’s age and privilege. Filmmaking isn’t a make-or-break situation for him; if he fails, he’ll have many alternatives available, perhaps one more properly suited to his actual self-worth. Basically, Leigh’s a shitty 18-year-old in a massive line of shitty 18-year-olds, and were it not for the film’s wider scope, Kid Icarus would teeter on being a mere study in apathy and embarrassment, or the indifference and indecisiveness common for a kid of Leigh’s age and privilege.
Kid Icarus: Conclusion
Thankfully, Ott and McLaughlin are also interested in the characters Leigh surrounds himself with. Paul Zeigler, a much older classmate of Leigh’s; Cory Zacharia, one of his actors; and a friend that Leigh initially enlists as his boom operator but keeps displacing on set — these three characters work together to form a misfit cloud around Leigh’s film production. Zeigler, a control freak clearly living vicariously through Leigh’s youth is probably the film’s saddest character, but it doesn’t take long to see why Ott has continued to make Zacharia a muse of sorts in the following decade — he seems to constantly exude a concurrence of sundry emotions (horny, happy, excited, depressed, confused) that feels impossible to articulate.
The filmmakers lose something when they steer away from Leigh and this small circle to spend time with more grounded cast and crew members, who offer the camera objective, surrogate-like thoughts about Leigh’s obstinate incompetence — something we’re fully aware of already — but Kid Icarus offers a rich and entertaining perspective on growing up aimless in the American West, though its most lasting power comes from characters on the film’s fringes.
Have you seen the film? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below!
Kid Icarus is now available on Amazon on Amazon Prime.
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