Typist Artist Pirate King review — an earnest yet haphazard biopic

★★☆☆☆
A committed central performance and a comforting narrative structure are not enough, ultimately, to save this earnest yet haphazard biopic. The subject is the British artist and paranoid schizophrenic Audrey Amiss, here played by Monica Dolan as an abrasive, abusive, junk food-spewing Tasmanian devil who consistently slips from “transgressive feminist role model” into just plain old “wildly annoying” (shades of Rik Mayall in Drop Dead Fred).

As if to soften the impact, the normally redoubtable writer-director Carol Morley (The Falling) sends Audrey on a nonsensical road trip, from London to Sunderland, with a barely credible companion, a psychiatric nurse played by Kelly Macdonald, whose reasons for accompanying and remaining with Andrey never fully convince. Along the way pointless stuff happens and Audrey veers instinctively from initially mousy to aggressively offensive with everyone she meets. There is also a syrup-laden finale and a sense that, unlike An Angel at My Table, Safe or Sweetie, this is not one of the great films about mental illness.
12A, 108min
In cinemas