Tim Sutton’s Taurus looks at Colson Baker, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly, through the lens of art as therapy. After showing a striking flare for menace as a violent bank robber in Sutton’s last film, the tawdry western potboiler The Last Son, Baker essentially plays a version of himself here. Or rather, given his character’s slow trudge toward a tragic end, the version of himself that could have been had he not kicked his addictions.
The film blurs the line between reality and fiction right out of the gate, introducing Cole (Baker) as he weaves through screaming fans and takes the stage at what is no doubt one of Machine Gun Kelly’s customarily chaotic concerts. Soon after, an up-and-coming singer named Lena (Naomi Wild) is called to the rap-rocker’s swanky studio for a late-night recording session, and Taurus begins to reveal itself as a hypnotic portrait of the artist as an enigma.
Inside his dark recording studio, Cole is hunched over a piano, resembling a lanky phantom. “I want it to sound far away from everything, like everything’s upside down,” he says about the mournful lyrics that Lena is about to sing, more than hinting at the depths of his anguish.
Even without knowing that Sutton had Baker prepare for his role by watching Last Days, it’s impossible to imagine Taurus even existing without Gus Van Sant’s fictionalized account of Kurt Cobain’s slow and tragic demise. Sutton’s film guides us through the dark night of the soul that is Cole’s life as he’s shuttled from his luxe Hollywood Hills rental house to the recording studio to various PR gigs and meetings with irritating managers and executives. And as he’s deep in the throes of addiction, he’s in an almost catatonic state through all of this.
But where Last Days is coolly impassive, Sutton’s film is a more immediate look at the casualties of celebrity. Here and there, Cole jolts out of his torpor to reveal facets of his being as he opines on his artistic inspiration, performing for millions, and the perils of fame. In one interview sequence, after relaying his joyful teenage memories of discovering inspirational musical acts like Blink-182 and 50 Cent to the reporter, Cole labels musical artists as divine and sacrificial, even linking their ways to the rituals of ancient Mayan culture.
Taurus is titled after Baker’s zodiac sign, and the film abides by the belief that the bonds of astrological fate are difficult to break. Cole’s prized possession is a quartz stone which he says contains all of his life experiences, and when he loses it, his downward spiral accelerates.
Taurus, then, is in the business of self-aggrandizement, but this is a film that understands that stardom is inherently aggrandizing. The film, too, isn’t suffocated by its cloud of self-seriousness, given Baker’s willingness to regularly, and sometimes comically, expose Cole as an outright asshole toward both his adoring fans and his exasperated support system.
For one, Cole an utter failure as a father to his young daughter, Rose (Avery Essex), whom he loses custody of to his ex-wife, Mae (played, in a further extension of the film’s hall of mirrors, by Baker’s real-life squeeze, Megan Fox). But perhaps the greatest insight into his psyche is provided by the poignant depiction of his tumultuous, co-dependent relationship to his personal assistant, Ilana (Maddie Hasson), the only person whom he truly opens up to. Throughout, she has to clean up his messes while bearing the brunt of verbal abuse.
As Cole sits vacantly through sales pitches on becoming a corporate brand ambassador or lectures from his manager, Ray (Scoot McNairy), on failing to produce music on the timely schedule that he’s being paid for, Sutton bitingly satirizes a city where everything and everyone is a commodity. Like Funny Face, which similarly put New York under such a microscope, Taurus also has an otherworldly vibe, with the camera often floating through the empty spaces that Cole traverses and pausing to linger on odd tangential interactions between side characters. The L.A. of the film suggests a kind of purgatorial realm, especially after Cole’s downward spiral seems to start psychically affecting everyone in his orbit and when he becomes increasingly haunted by a young fan (T.K. Weaver) with a murderous past.
Pop culture doesn’t lack for treatises on the pressures of Hollywood, such as the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, all seeming points of reference here. But the nakedly confessional focus of Taurus allows it to claim its own space in this canon. While one’s mileage for this kind of celebrity introspection may ultimately depend on one’s pre-existing views of Machine Gun Kelly, Baker undoubtedly wears his heart, in all its messy glory, on his sleeve. By the end, as Cole drifts toward “upside down” oblivion, Baker upends any expected notions of an insipid vanity project by making Cole’s turbulent interiority echo even louder than his frenzied performance style.
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