Metacritic reviews

At times a bit too enamored of these loose conceits, The Nowhere Inn sometimes registers as a cheap fuck-with-the-audience provocation that might have been better suited for a viral short (or several), but at its finest moments the movie conjures a singular vision steeped in zaniness, but not devoid of purpose.

The Nowhere Inn deeply explores the dynamic between performer and audience and performer with self. It does so in a way I’ve never seen before. It has so many layers that at some point, you get lost in the thick of it, but in a good way.

The Nowhere Inn is simultaneously satire and fan service, frothy fun and pretentious nonsense, depending on what the viewer wants it to be.

Outside its value as a cautionary tale about introducing a power dynamic into a friendship between former equals, there’s an emptiness at the heart of The Nowhere Inn which might be part of the point (ah, the vacuity of celebrity! the hollowness of fame!) but the observation of emptiness is not the same as actual substance.

The film, directed by Portlandia helmer Bill Benz, is too much of a hodge-podge for its own good.

Nowhere Inn never quite crawls out from under the David Byrne influence as a movie or a film conceit. It’s more droll than funny, and only novel in the sense that she’s mocking the conventions of such movies and they’re beyond mockery at this point.

As a ballad about a rock star’s soul, The Nowhere Inn is a fun riff performed on flimsy strings.

Try as it might to blend the music-conscious idiosyncrasies of Portlandia with the varied persona of one of our weirdest, most valued artists, The Nowhere Inn ends up going, well, nowhere.

The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.

The Nowhere Inn . . . is a collection of comedic and musical sketches that are not funny, weird or thoughtful enough to sell its creators’ insistent, but mostly trite and undeveloped, ideas about the performative nature of self-fashioning and creative authenticity.