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- guardian.co.uk, Friday October 26 2007 15.13 BST
Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris, grabbing his crotch for pennies beside the Arc de Triomphe. Sometimes his work takes him further afield: to an old folks' home, where he moonwalks among the bemused, wheelchair-bound residents. "You can live forever!" he falsettos in their ears. "Don't die! Don't die!"
Happily there is life in Harmony Korine yet. The enfant-terrible director electrified the art-house with his 1997 debut Gummo, followed that up with the uncompromising Julien Donkeyboy and then promptly vanished on an eight-year, drug-fuelled lost weekend. Now he's back with a wild, teasing ramble along the margins of celebrity culture.
Fresh from his performance to the pensioners, Luna's Jackson hooks up with Samantha Morton's Marilyn Monroe and travels to a remote Scottish Shangri-La inhabited by a brutish Chaplin (Denis Lavant), a foul-mouthed Abe Lincoln (Richard Strange) and an imperious Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg). Together these lost souls hatch a scheme to stage, if not the greatest show on earth, then surely the most peculiar.
Mister Lonely is too idiosyncratic to qualify as a straight satire on our ongoing Stars in Their Eyes era. The film is more akin to a glittering parlour game; a post-modern masque in which Korine's relatively famous friends impersonate nobodies who are in turn impersonating the super-famous. But it's delivered with abandon and comes laced with beguiling little diversions. I particularly liked the bizarre Central American subplot that involves a flotilla of nuns who leap out of an aeroplane to prove their faith, wimples rippling against a bright blue sky. One has the sense that Korine's films - the making of them and the watching of them - involve a similar leap of faith. On this occasion we all land safely.
· At the Odeon West End, London, today and on Monday. Box office: 020-7928 3232.
