The Loneliest Man in Town

The Austrian blues musician and die-hard Elvis fan Al Cook often has the same nightmare: he is playing a piano from which the black keys have vanished. In his real life, too, more and more is at risk of disappearing: his glory days are behind him, his wife has passed away, Vienna no longer feels like home, and soon his flat, full of memories and musical memorabilia, is due to be demolished. Now that the world seems to be moving on without him, it is time for a radical new beginning. The directing duo Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, known for their boundary-blurring cinema that straddles fiction and reality, have their friend and real-life artist Al Cook play a version of himself: an amiable man possessed by nostalgia. With plenty of melancholy and dry humour, the result is a minimalist portrait of a headstrong older man in his twilight years. Rich in its simplicity and grand in its sensitivity, The Loneliest Man in Town could rank amongst the finest works of Aki Kaurismäki.