Cheyenne (Sean Penn) is a weird looking retired rock star living in Dublin. He spends his days hanging out with his young friend Mary (Eve Hewson, Bono's daughter) trying to set her up with a straight laced guy working at the mall. After the death of his father whom he hasn't talked to in 30 years, he finds that he's been hunting a little known Auschwitz guard named Aloise Lange. So he decides to continue the hunt himself.

There is nothing wrong with weird, and I like Sean Penn's odd looking soft spoken ex-rocker character. I like his relationship with Mary. It's funny that he keeps trying to set her up with somebody who has nothing in common with her. Then it takes a turn into the surreal.

It's like they abandoned a good movie to do another movie. All the characters in the first act are basically dropped once he goes on the Nazi hunt. The nice semi-father-daughter relationship is dropped. The wife is dropped. The final reveal is kinda interesting, but it's not worth the lost opportunities of good character relationships.

Sean Penn plays John Smith, a.k.a. Cheyenne, a Robert Smith-like former pop star with wild black hair, black mascara around his piercing blue eyes and a trepidatious mouth finely-etched in red lipstick. He has been out of the music business (and, indeed, absent from the mainstream of life) for 20 years, secluded in his Dublin mansion after two kids killed themselves while listening to his forlorn songs. Upon learning that his once-estranged, recently-deceased father was a victim of the Nazi atrocities of World War II, he consults with a Nazi hunter and embarks on a mission to kill the SS officer still living in the United States. Director Paolo Sorrentino, who also co-authored the screenplay with Umberto Contarello, is tantalized by offbeat humor so low-keyed it sometimes passes for pathos; he's also enamored of faces, and he allows Penn lots of screen-time (too much time, one may argue) for the actor to work his soulful stare into the camera. Penn doesn't quite work his way into the viewer's heart, however, and this is the fault of the filmmaker, who unfolds his highly unlikely story very slowly and with a great deal of artistic flourish (i.e., pretension). Cinematographer Luca Bigazzi's camera swoops and glides around barren landscapes and empty rooms with amusingly smooth panache, but the audience isn't picking up on anything substantial except for the technique. Penn goes out on a limb with his performance--talking in a prissy-timid yet direct way that recalls Andy Warhol's pattern of speech--but, in the end, the role is a costume, and many other actors could have played John Smith--and perhaps improved upon it. Sorrentino wants to make us laugh and squirm and take pause. He wants to break our hearts over the course of the lead character's picaresque journey, but there's no truth in it. *1/2 from ****

Cheyenne (Sean Penn),a retired rock star living off his royalties in Dublin, returns to New York City to find the man responsible for a humiliation suffered by his recently deceased father during WWII.

This film took a little bit to warm up to. Cheyenne is a character who is hard to understand -- both the person as a whole, and what he is saying. For the first half hour, I just kept thinking Sean Penn was miscast in the role. But you know what? I warmed up to the part and now see the genius of what they did there. (The part was specifically written for Penn, by the way.)

Could the story have been told without the lead being an aging rock star? Yes. Could it have been told without him having childlike mental processes? Certainly. But there are key moments, and certain things he says, that are all the more brilliant by the way he delivers them and the character from which these things erupt.

The name and visual references to Siouxsie and the Banshees and Robert Smith of the Cure were nice, to kind of give you a feeling of what era Cheyenne and the Fellows was coming out of. The title of the film, of course, is a reference to the Talking Heads (as explained in one of the few semi-sentimental scenes). Heck, they even got David Byrne to write new music just for the film.

I have not seen Paolo Sorrentino's other films, so I cannot rightly put this one in context. But based on the critical response, it seems that this must be at least as good as his previous releases. Sorrentino, who is Italian, was given great credit for "getting" what it was to make an American road movie, and how to make the English language excel in the delivery of deadpan humor. I certainly agree.