“You may not have a final destination in mind, but you’ll be stopping at different ports along the way. You have to take control of your life and set a course for where you want to go; otherwise, you’ll find yourself in unpredictable situations,” Leonard continues.
It’s a fitting opening line for “Flipside,” a film looking back at an artist’s life and career. But Leonard, who died before enough footage could be shot to make such a film, isn’t the artist whose life is being scrutinized. It is director Chris Wiltcha, a filmmaker who made a bit of a splash in 2000 with his humorous memoir, “The Target Shoots First,” about the philosophy major and would-be documentary filmmaker’s struggle to maintain artistic integrity while working in marketing at Columbia House Record Club.
After Target, Wiltcha made his living primarily as a director of TV commercials, along the way winning an Emmy for directing the short-lived TV show This American Life and producing a documentary on the making of Judd Apatow’s film Funny People, the behind-the-scenes footage of which reportedly aired once on Comedy Central before ending up as an extra on the film’s 2009 home entertainment DVD release. Wiltcha’s own life seems filled with canceled and stalled projects.
On the surface, “Flipside” (the name comes from said store) is a documentary about the New Jersey record store where Wiltcha worked as a teenager, but ultimately turns out to be funny, weird and wonderfully about much more than a record store now on the brink of bankruptcy, a store that’s on the verge of becoming just as cluttered as its namesake. In addition to appearances from Leonard, Apatow and Ira Glass, “Flipside” includes interviews with Wiltcha’s parents; writer-producer David Milch, now diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and creator of “Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” who originally hired Wiltcha to make that unfinished film about Leonard; author Starley Cain, who discusses her own experience with writer’s block; and Errol Morris, the “hero” of Wiltcha’s documentary. And, perhaps most serendipitously, there’s Floyd Vivino, aka Uncle Floyd, the Pee-wee Herman-esque host of a cult cable TV show in New Jersey and New York from 1974 to 1998. Vivino was name-dropped in the David Bowie song “Slip Away” and turns up here as a surprise guest on Flipside, but his presence is more moving, even profound, than comic.
It all sounds packed, but “Flipside” never becomes confusing or disjointed, thanks in large part to Wilcha’s masterful grasp of its subject matter. The director’s smart, eloquent delivery, which moves from regret over life’s disappointments to a gradual acceptance of the compromises we all make, connects the film’s themes with a novelist’s skill and vision, weaving together threads about creativity, doing what you love and what you have to do, the constant battle between the urge to hold on to the past and the need to let go and move on, growing up and aging, finding purpose, selling records and selling out, and finding a kind of bliss in the gaps in between. (When Wilcha returns to his parents’ house, still full of old record albums and his father’s vast collection of soaps he salvaged from the hotel, he may be overcome with both a sense of nostalgia and a burning desire to have a garage sale.)
The film, like jazz, is a melancholic, lyrical meditation on life that ultimately belies Leonard’s opening warning about our ability to shape our own course: Controlling one’s own destiny, at least in “Flipside,” is an illusion.
The title is intended to be both literal and metaphorical. In one sense, “Flipside” is a love letter to a declining business whose owner, Dan Don Diego, is depicted as more of an archivist than a merchant, trapped in the amber and inertia of the past. (His business failure preceded the opening of a second record store, but it may not have been entirely due to forces beyond Don Diego’s control.) In another sense, “Flipside” is a poetic allusion to life’s B-side: all the roads not taken, the only roads, or the only vehicles, that we all inevitably end up on despite telling ourselves we’re in control.
No rating. AFI Silver Award winner. No issues whatsoever. 96 minutes.
