Producers: Peter Dinklage, David Ginsberg, Caddy Vanasirikul, Brian O’Shea, Elliott Lester, Shannon Gaulding, Chad Oakes, Michael Frislev, Andre L III and Gianni Nunnari   Director: Elliott Lester  Screenplay: Chris Kelley   Cast: Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Esme Creed-Miles, Levon Hawke, Leslie Grace, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Macon Blair, Arliss Howard, James Hetfield, Ned Dennehy, David Midthunder, Andrew Schulz, Ryan Robbins, Guy Sprung, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant    Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: B

The moodiness is so thick you could cut it with a knife in Elliott Lester’s adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s 2013 novel.  Scripted by newcomer Chris Kelley, “The Thicket” is set at the cusp of the twentieth century, in a desolate, wintry American West where technology is just starting to intrude—a motorcycle appears in the opening scene—and the old way of life is crumbling. 

Yet the story, which basically comes down to the pursuit of a gang of cutthroat outlaws by a bounty hunter and the man who’s hired him, is a traditional one.  But it comes with some unexpected twists.  The bounty hunter, Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage), is a dwarf.  The gang leader, Cut Throat Bill, is a woman (Juliette Lewis).  And they’re joined by a sense of resentment against the world as objects of ridicule—Jones for his size, Bill for her heavily scarred face, the result of a brutal childhood narrated late in the film by a preacher (Ned Dennehy) whose church she’s burned down.

Jones is hired by callow young Jack Parker to track down Bill, who’s abducted his sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) after killing their grandfather Caleb (Guy Sprung) in an altercation over a ferry boat ride.  (The siblings had just lost both their parents to smallpox.)  Jones and his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are themselves being pursued by brothers Simon and Malachi Deasy (James Hetfield and Macon Blair); they’ve been deputized by Bailey Mayfield (Ryan Roberts), a town grandee who’d been humiliated by Jones after Mayfield had not only tried to shortchange him on a grave-digging job but then disparaged him as a man.

Jones reluctantly accepts Jack’s offer after being promised a plot of land the Parkers are scheduled to inherit, and so the three men set out in pursuit of Bill and her remaining gang members (Arliss Howard, David Midthunder, Derek Gilroy and Teach Grant), who are headed for the Thicket, a heavily-forested region that the snows will cut off from the rest of the world until the spring thaw.  The unofficial posse will gradually get two new members: Jimmy Sue (Leslie Grace), a prostitute Jack rescues from her cruel boss (Andrew Schultz), and Malachi Deasy, after Bill has killed his brother.  All will be settled at a cabin in the Thicket where the bodies pile up. 

Dinklage and Lewis are both in fine form, he putting his gruff act to excellent use as he mans a rifle with a telescopic attachment that he inherited from Annie Oakley, with whom he once worked the circuit, and she playing the snarling, pitiless villain to perfection, cutting down one hapless victim after another.  (She’s also the motorcyclist in that initial scene, stopping long enough to interrupt a funeral and order the casket opened so that she can steal the corpse’s warm coat, as well as a horse.)  The rest are all fine, but even the most flamboyant of them pale in contrast to the stars, who, thankfully, share one scene at a table in a saloon, commiserating over their mistreatment by the world. 

The film benefits from the authentically frigid Canadian locations, beautifully caught by cinematographer Guillermo Garza in painterly widescreen images.  The production design (Justin Ludwig), art direction (Edward Smith Taylor), set decoration (Tara Bartlette) and costumes (Ann Maskrey) all contribute to a compelling sense of place and time.  Lester’s approach is very deliberate, with even the action sequences taking their time to unfold, and Jean-Christophe Bouzy’s editing contributes to the unhurried, meditative feel.  So does Ray Suen’s understatedly mournful score, which gives way in the bittersweet coda to a Schubert piano piece.  That final sequence is a callback to the observation from Emily Dickinson that opens the film about home—something that most of the characters in “The Thicket,” even those most damaged, are striving to find for themselves.

This was obviously a passion project for Dinklage, who also serves as one of the producers, and although it’s not without some flaws of pacing, he’s done it proud.  This handsomely mounted, slow-burning Western has a plot that’s essentially a genre commonplace, but it adds enough unusual elements to give it real distinction.

Producers: Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann and Kirstin Winkler   Director: Simon Verhoeven   Screenplay: Simon Verhoeven   Cast: Elan Ben Ali, Tijan Njie, Matthias Schweighöfer, Graham Rogers, Bella Dayne, Tijan Marei, Samuel S. Franklin, Mitsou Jung, Penelope Frego, Roxanne Rittmann and Nico Ehrenteit   Distributor: Vertical

Grade: B

Most musical biographies, even the warts-and-all ones, have a hint of hagiography to them; this one shows some sympathy for subjects who are usually treated with disdain, and sets them in a satirical send-up of the music business as a whole, and, even more expansively, of the culture of empty celebrity they represented. Simon Verhoeven’s “Girl You Know It’s True” is a cheekily over-the-top telling of the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Milli Vanilli, the high-stepping dreadlocked, tight-jeaned, leather-jacketed duo of Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, whose career was wrecked by the revelation that they were lip-synching “their” songs (purloined by their producer from other bands) to tapes recorded by others, including the fabulously successful title tune.

Their career was short indeed.  Their debut album, released in 1989, won them a Grammy for Best New Artist in early 1990.  (The award was later revoked.)  In July, 1990, a hard-drive malfunction at a live concert had revealed the lip-synching, and in November their producer Frank Farian confessed the whole business and effectively torpedoed their viability as an act.  He continued to work in the business until his death in 2024; they were treated as pariahs. Pilatus died in 1998 of an overdose; Morvan is still alive.  

Looking back, the whole affair was a tempest in a teapot.  But it was treated as some sort of gargantuan cultural scandal, and the fate of Milli Vanilli still resonates as a sort of cautionary tale today.  Luke Korem made a well-received documentary simply titled “Milli Vanilli,” released in 2023, that laid out the entire episode in detail. 

Simon Verhoeven’s movie is very different, an ultra-glitzy, cheerfully irreverent extravaganza that doesn’t ignore the pair’s part in the deception that brought them down but portrays them as victims, too—victims of a system that revels in phoniness and of a man who knew how to manipulate it.  Verhoeven doesn’t exonerate Morvan and Pilatus, but he does say they were as much used as users.

Of the two, Pilatus gets the deeper treatment.  Per the script, he was the son of an American military man and a German woman, placed in an orphanage before being adopted by a white German family.  After suffering condescending treatment, he left home, became a model and dancer, and linked up with Paris-born Morvan to form a joint act.  They were noticed by music producer Farian, who became their Svengali, and ultimately their betrayer. 

Elan Ben Ali and Tijan Njie are utterly convincing as Morvan and Pilatus (whom Romeo Guy Da Silva plays as a boy in the early scenes), capturing not only their look but their sheer onstage energy.  Matthias Schweighöfer plays Farian like a Nazi general, laying down his law to them, determining the songs they would perform to (but not sing) and assigning them their name (in a particularly amusing scene, with Milli coming from the nickname of his girlfriend, played by Bella Dayne, and Vanilli from the ice cream they were all enjoying at the time).  Farian is unscrupulous but, at first, extremely successful in gaining them popularity.  From the very beginning, however, the artists actually singing the songs they lip-synched to—John Davis (Samuel S. Franklin) and Brad Howell (David Mayonga)—and the little-known groups whose songs he pilfered, like Baltimore-based Numarx, were disaffected.  The seeds of disaster existed from the start.

Not that the duo didn’t contribute to their own downfall.  Verhoeven portrays them as intoxicated by their fame and more than happy to indulge themselves in the decadence afforded by their new status.  They tell us so themselves in narration delivered in joint conversation—some of it posthumously—years later. 

And yet they offer excuses for their prima donna conduct: they were young, naïve, and bound by the contract they’d unthinkingly signed with Farian.  They wanted to do their own singing and songwriting, but he nixed the idea.  They were able, with the help of the assistant (Todd Headlee) Farian imposed on them, to secure a vocal coach, but their sessions devolved into drug-driven parties.  Verhoeven also inserts a subplot about Pilatus’ unhappy effort to reconnect with his biological father, which adds to his decline.

The movie has been glossily made.  The production design (Heike Lange), art direction (Christian Pralle), costumes (Ingken Benesch) and set decoration (Alexandra Pilhatsch and Kate Van Der Merwe) mimic the period ambience with zest, and Jo Heim’s cinematography accentuates the vividness.  A trio of editors– Alexander Berner, Felix Schmerbeck and Elena Schmidt—add to the energy, with the musical numbers especially propulsive.

You have to treat any musical biography with a degree of suspicion, this one more than most; even the title carries an ironic warning.  But without accepting the movie as gospel, you can appreciate the vitality with which it depicts an odd episode in pop music history that continues to resonate despite its essentially trivial nature.