Fascism, punk, euphoria and despair … it’s all here, or mostly, in this hilarious biopic of Eduard Limonov, the rock’n’roll émigré Russian writer and patriot-dissident who wound up poverty-stricken in New York at about the same time as Sid Vicious. Limonov (a pen name taken from the Russian word “limonka”, meaning lime but also slang for grenade) became an angry bohemian, a sexual outlaw and a celebrated adulte terrible in French literary circles in the 80s, railing against the prissy liberals and mincing hypocrites. Then he returned to Russia and became the leader of a violent group called the National Bolshevik Party. Tactfully, nobody here points out the similarity to “national socialist party”. It was if someone had given Michel Houellebecq a machine gun.
Ben Whishaw gives a glorious performance as Limonov – funny, dour, crazy, sexy, boiling with unhappiness and apparently bipolar (although this diagnosis is something else that doesn’t seriously occur to anyone). And maybe always, at the back of his mind, worried that his writing is not good enough to make him immortal, and that posing, PR, situationist outrage and political violence are his real vocation. Inevitably his autobiographical fictions are compared by a New York publisher to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Limonov says he hasn’t seen it), but he winds up being a grizzled conflation of Ed Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
