“What some people fail to understand is all of it’s me and none of it’s me,” St. Vincent explains as footage of her wailing on her guitar flashes across the screen, strobe lights dancing around her as a man in all black slowly reaches to choke her from behind. She’s on her Masseduction album tour, where she donned thigh-high orange boots and a skin-tight patent leather dress to match, oozing the sex appeal that infiltrated this album era. Her personality onstage is dominating, her confidence seductive, and her music hypnotic, lyrics cutting like an open wound with emotion pouring from her pores. St. Vincent is her, but she’s also not her.
In The Nowhere Inn, Annie Clark plays herself, the musician better known as St. Vincent, in a layered mockumentary about a documentary about her gone south. Her best friend in life, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame, also plays herself as the documentary director. “I’m in my flop era,” Brownstein admits despairingly over coffee at the park. This is why she is desperate to make a music documentary about her successful friend Annie, one that will break the boundaries of the sterile subgenre that often paints a scattered, paper-thin glossy portrait of musicians (to hammer home some irony, The Nowhere Inn premiered alongside
Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana at Sundance in 2020, the antithesis of the film St. Vincent is making).
The Nowhere Inn is actually directed by Bill Benz, not Brownstein, but he is merely a cog in their reality-warping film experiment. The film’s script was penned by St. Vincent and Brownstein, a film that seems like it was supposed to close the door on her Masseduction era and give way to her Daddy’s Home era, her deeply personal record that tells the story of her father’s incarceration. At the beginning of The Nowhere Inn, Brownstein doesn’t want to peel back her best friend’s personal barriers too much, pivoting from the crew discussing St. Vincent’s relationship with her father on camera.
However, when she refuses to dive into the personal because she doesn’t want to cross friend boundaries, Brownstein finds herself a dud of a documentary. Footage of Annie playing Scrabble with her team on the tour bus and playing her Nintendo Switch during downtime
before her shows doesn’t give the rock star energy Brownstein craves to capture, and when she breaks the news to her friend, a crack forms, and Clark starts to feed off the energy of her self-created character, and losing the person Brownstein recognized as her dear friend.
Except the more Clark becomes St. Vincent, the more truths start to reveal themselves. In one day of filming, she introduces her fictitious Texas-sized family, choreographing a country cover of her song “Year of the Tiger,” a song depicting her deep depression in 2010 after losing her father to prison for 12 years (it’s the only song her mother is a credited songwriter on). The album she’s promoting, Masseduction, is about structure and control, something that’s
unraveling in her and close to being lost by The Nowhere Inn’s end. “Oh, drop me by the burnt-out sign, where hell is near and heaven hides within paradise,” she sings at the film’s end, onstage to a faceless crowd, after she’s pushed too far by Brownstein. “Always knew you’d end up here, been waiting now for years to see you in my everlasting mirror,” she cries, and it’s clear the walls have burst, her father’s impending release from jail is in the rearview mirror, closing in on her. While St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn is not the standard performative music documentary, it opens a window to her soul that many are never able to give away so freely in front of the camera.
This article appears in September 17 • 2021.