Vague Visages’ Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie review contains minor spoilers. Kirill Serebrennikov’s 2024 movie features Ben Whishaw, Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Tomas Arana. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Ordinarily, part of the enjoyment of watching a film comes from getting to know its main characters — who they are, what makes them tick. But that’s basically an impossible task in a film like Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie, which features a protagonist who is essentially unknowable. In the hands of Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov and the utterly fearless Ben Whishaw, the 2024 film chronicles the chaotic life story of Eduard Limonov, a controversial Russian political figure and supremely unreliable narrator. Freed from the bonds of traditional storytelling, Serebrennikov (in his first England language production) goes HAM, transitioning between time periods and plot lines with anarchic panache. Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie is a divisive film, but its bold stylistic choices make up for any narrative deficiencies.

From the very start, Limonov (Whishaw) strains against the conventions of an ordinary biopic. He’s barely even one person, so how could anyone hope to build a coherent story around him? Limonov has big dreams for himself — dreams that can’t be achieved in Soviet Russia, so he moves to New York City, like any self-respecting aspiring writer in the 1970s. Limonov is a punk and a poet, a radical and a butler. He flits from occupation to occupation (and sometimes complete lack of occupation) with a chaotic energy, taking on anything and everything in his quest to make a name for himself as a writer. Then Limonov moves to Paris. Next, he goes back to Russia, his exile ended by the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire, where he became an unlikely — and extremely controversial — political figure. It’s impossible to establish any kind of throughline to Limonov’s narrative, because the real-life individual certainly didn’t have one. His entire existence was more of a series of vignettes than anything approaching coherency.

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Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie arguably features Whishaw’s most unhinged performance. The actor throws himself into the character, embodying everything from Limonov’s clipped Russian accent to his coiled energy to his pretentious and entirely self-obsessed narration style. Without a commanding and self-assured central performance, it’s easy to see how the rest of Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie would simply fall away. The subject isn’t a likable character, and although viewers may not root for him to succeed, there’s something intriguing about his determination to carve out an extremely unique life for himself.

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Limonov’s eccentricities come through via Serebrennikov’s stylistic choices. The director approaches the passages of time by having the subject barrel his way through a visual representation of each year, almost as though it were a cinematic version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” It feels like Limonov is acutely aware of the fact that he’s in a movie about himself, and his subversive nature bleeds through into all aspects of the production. As the title character narrates each segment of his own life, reality blends with Limonov’s fantasies, making it unclear exactly how much of his life’s stories actually happened.

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Things go a little off the rails once Limonov returns to Russia, and probably with good reason. Upon being reunited with his home country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the film’s subject becomes a famously controversial right-wing idealogue, something Serebrennikov seems unsure of how to address. Some viewers may feel that Limonov gets let off easy, and though he died two years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Whishaw’s character was strongly in favor of Crimean annexation and would have undoubtedly strongly approved of Putin’s military efforts. Serebrennikov seemingly avoids passing judgment on Limonov’s morality and political beliefs, focusing instead on a wild character who defies easy classification. Some components of Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie are more naturally engaging than others, but the end result is a bemused yet creatively satisfying look at a Russian oddball.

Audrey Fox (@theaudreyfox) is a features editor and film/television critic at Looper, with bylines at RogerEbert.com, Nerdist, /Film and IGN, amongst other outlets. She has been blessed by the tomato overlords with their coveted seal of approval. Audrey received her BA in film from Clark University and her MA in International Relations from Harvard University. When she’s not watching movies, Audrey loves historical non-fiction, theater, traveling and playing the violin (poorly).

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