Skirting the line between a YouTube video and feature production, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a provocative work that captures the vapid shallowness of celebrity in our social media dominated era. The film’s critique of the short attention span economy and cancel culture may be too conservative for some, but its frenetic pace, unique story structure and visual design make it an important study of the cultural ramifications of social media influencers. 

Drawing on Elia Kazan’s rag to riches film about a drifter turned TV star, A Face in the Crowd (1957), Mainstream follows the rise of the mysterious Los Angeles-based street entertainer Link (an impressively hypnotic Andrew Garfield) to YouTube deity “No One Special,” a satire of an offensive and narcissistic social media influencer. Joining Link is Frankie (a brilliant Maya Hawke), an aimless artist in her 20s who works at a nightclub and dreams of making it big. Hoping to enter the circle of successful YouTubers, Frankie discovers the strange mascot-wearing Link at a mall as he rambles endlessly to strangers. Frankie soon becomes both ingénue and Svengali to Link, admiring the entertainer while using him as a prop to gain views on her YouTube channel. 

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Frankie and Link soon work in a studio, sign with a views-hungry agent (a prickish Jason Schwartzman) and gain a platform significant enough to develop content on a larger scale. The result of their success is a game show — “Your Phone or Your Dignity” — which forces contestants to pick between giving up their phone for a small chunk of money or being put through spectacular obstacles to fight for their phone (there is a hilarious scene where a contestant must box a professional to obtain his phone), a gimmick that soon grows old. Wrestling for viewership gains, Link reverses course on the show and begins to attack and exploit contestants in more controversial fashion, proving to be a hypocrite whose anti-phone exploits and ironic personality, meant to critique a social media-obsessed society, ultimately yield gains for his channel and brand. 

Mainstream acknowledges this hypocrisy in direct ways. A round table scene with Link and real-life polarizing YouTubers (Jake Paul and Patrick Starr play themselves) instantly turns into a scathing critique of No One Special’s abrasiveness and rude persona (the fictionalized moderator of the discussion is appropriately played by the father of such personalities, Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville). The tragedy of a former contestant of the game show strikes next, and the subsequent relentless criticisms of No One Special allows Link to become a unique sympathetic figure in the current era, a rich white kid whose humanity is undermined by the social media mob who make it their mission to “cancel” the provocateur. 

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Mainstream and Garfield’s brilliance are found in the creation of No One Special, a performative and obsessive character who takes over Link, blurring the lines between performer and role, calling attention to the challenging ways in which authenticity is navigated in a social media-dominated culture. The film’s lack of subtlety could be a comment on the culture at large (it’s hard to be subtle with disruptive YouTubers), but its most cringeworthy scenes still hold considerable subtext. Consider a moment when Frankie vomits in a bathroom sink and there are emojis in place of puke. Here, Mainstream wears the cloth of the very culture it purports to critique.