Metacritic reviews

Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self.

While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.

Even when Disco Boy threatens to be too much or too little, however, Rogowski’s strange, sparse, plaintive performance keeps its soul intact, and its most poignant query afloat above all the flash and dazzle and neon lights: just how much of themselves people will sacrifice for a paper identity.

At a taut and elliptical ninety minutes, a couple of awkward final steps hardly feel like fatal flaws. Getting in, getting down, and getting out as style hopping sizzle reel, Disco Boy heralds a promising new talent who totally has the moves.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar.

A committed, intensely physical lead performance by German actor Franz Rogowski (recently seen in Ira Sachs’ Passages), luminous cinematography courtesy of ace DP Helene Louvart, and stirring electronic music by composer Vitalic all come together to make this a sensuous, striking film experience. But, yeesh, that script by director-screenwriter Giacomo Abbruzzese is a mess.

It’s also perhaps the first leading role of his glittering career to date where Franz Rogowski is miscast, feeling inappropriate or perhaps too worldly for the naive military grunt at the center; either way, the film’s debuting director Giacomo Abbruzzese attempts drawing out a performance that hits predictable notes of machismo, despair, and anguish.

While Disco Boy is gorgeous to look at, a more coherent script would have done wonders to hold the movie together.

No doubt Rogowski shines brightly in this role—he’s known for his physical acting and portraying tacit protagonists has become his speciality lately (“Luzifer” or “Great Freedom”)—but seeing the way Louvart films him causes ripples of delight, most probably saving the film from a decisive failure on a conceptual level.