Pitchfork

[Posted Monday, October 20th, 2003 04:30:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

Jeremy Enigk's faithful must be able to live in hope: otherwise, they'd have found the flag of some other seraph-voiced prophet to follow by now. This autumn was supposed to be the redemption for that congregation, but if they, like our own Nick Sylvester, found that the recent debut of The Fire Theft left them feeling robbed and cold, then they can take a little warmth from this: Enigk is working on another solo project. It's the score to a film called The United States of Leland, which co-stars Kevin Spacey. "[The film is] about a troubled fifteen-year-old kid who's done some bad things," Enigk told Rolling Stone. Apparently writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge was a devotee of Enigk's previous solo album, 1996's Return of the Frog Queen. So much a fan was Hoge that, as Enigk says: "He tracked me down and asked me for six months. I kept on saying 'No, I don't have time, I'm doing the Fire Theft,' until finally [producer] Brad Wood just said, 'Dude, you talk about it all the time, just do it!' I gave Matthew a call, he came out to Washington and played me the rough cut, and I was blown away. It was tough, but an amazing thing to accomplish."

The United States of Leland looks like another entrant into the growing genre of suburban angst movies, which means one of Enigk's songs will surely be played while a family eats dinner at an impeccably-furnished table and makes pitifully stilted attempts to speak to one another. Still, the flick has got some things going for it. Granted, the titular Leland is played by former Mickey Mouse Clubber Ryan Gosling, and it's directed by a guy whose only previous credit is a film about living in a storage space (an idea which at least two separate stoners I know claim separately to have stumbled upon, and which was recently lampooned in The Onion). The cast also boasts Don Cheadle, Donnie Darko's Jena Malone, and former Twin Peaks sexpot Sherilyn Fenn.