Internet culture moves at warp speed, with microscopic trend generations and a hyper-specific aesthetic timeline, but Mainstream is unmoored from any particular era besides loose late-2010s. It’s adrift in the uncanny valley of films about the internet, boiling down an entire world of experience – parasocial relationships with influencers, the relentless hustle of building a following, the corrosive surreality of living for faceless likes – into a simple, pedantic message of social media: vacuous, vapid, bad.
Mainstream falls flat, in part, because it’s just not a good movie. But it also speaks to a larger difficulty of accurately capturing our screen lives, social or otherwise, on film. Since The Social Network in 2010, arguably still the most prominent film about social media (although it’s far less about one’s experience on early Facebook than one of the most expensive friendship breakups of all time, also co-starring Garfield), plenty of films and TV episodes have in
Mainstream opens on Frankie (
Maya Hawke) an aimless twenty-something living in L.A. who bartends to get by but dreams of making it big on YouTube. The film introduces her using text-on-screen in a series of dialogue cards straight out of a movie from the Silent Era, harkening back to a time before everything was so loud. In her sophomore feature succeeding 2013’s
Palo Alto, Coppola returns to the familiar creative breeding ground of disillusioned, self-destructive young people caught in the current of the cultural zeitgeist. This time, the environment is far more ravenous, more cutthroat, as murky suburban melancholy is traded in for neon lights, eye candy emojis, and like buttons. The plight of the young told through the lens of the carnivorous, sense-assaulting modern online influencer culture.
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The edgy new drama stars Andrew Garfield, Maya Hawke, and Nat Wolff. May 7, 2021
Ever since Icarus took his fateful trip, the idea of being cursed by getting just what we want has intrigued storytellers. Gia Coppola simply brought the idea into the age of social media.
In her new film,
Mainstream, out May 7 in theaters and on digital platforms, Coppola chronicles the rise and fall of Link, a social-media superstar (played by Andrew Garfield) whose collaboration with friends Frankie (Maya Hawke) and Jake (Nat Wolff) earns him an army of followers and unbelievable influence but doesn’t turn out to be everything he expected.