Brand: A Second Coming, film review: Ondi Timoner attempts to solve the riddle of Russell Brand

A Second Coming is likely to leave audiences with a mixture of admiration for and baffled exasperation with its subject

Ondi Timoner’s documentary offers an unflinching portrait of one of modern British culture’s most compelling – and infuriating – public figures (Capital Pictures)

Russell Brand has distanced himself from Ondi Timoner’s feature documentary about him. You can understand why the activist comedian is uncomfortable.

The film, which she started with his co-operation, features some painfully raw and intimate moments. These range from a scene in the back of the car with his father, who behaves with a casual cruelty toward him, to a poignant incident in his home town, Grays, in which a schoolgirl quizzes him about his short-lived marriage to Katy Perry, as if in disbelief that someone from a small town in Essex could marry a pop star.

Timoner has dug up footage of Brand in his drug-addicted days and of a wildly self-destructive performance he gave at the Edinburgh Festival when he cut his own body with glass.

As the title might suggest, Brand does appear to have a Messiah complex. That was the name of his 2013 stand-up tour which saw the comedian at his absolute best. Timoner includes several of the routines from the tour. Self-mocking, scatological, and very funny, they combined trenchant political analysis with gleeful outrageousness.

The problem with A Second Coming is that there is ultimately just too much Brand in it. Michael Winterbottom’s Brand documentary, The Emperor’s New Clothes (released earlier this year), benefited from having the comedian turn his attention toward the iniquities of the banking system (and away from himself).

Here, the focus is entirely on him. Timoner has enlisted plenty of people to have their say about him. Jeremy Paxman, Jonathan Ross, Rosie O’Donnell and Noel Gallagher all speak on camera. David Lynch gives him advice on meditation. There are interviews with his sweet-natured mother, his old girlfriend from his drama school days, and scenes in which he revisits childhood haunts.

Russell Brand with surrealist director David Lynch in 'Second Coming' (Capital Pictures)

Some of Brand’s pranks during his early career were inspired. Timoner includes hilarious footage of the youthful comedian dressed up as the Elephant Man in Liverpool Street Station, having a bizarre conversation with a policeman, and of his idiosyncratic campaign to save Spitalfields Market.

He doesn’t seem especially remorseful about “Sachsgate”, the telephone prank on the BBC radio show involving the actor Andrew Sachs that backfired disastrously. What startles him (and seems to flatter him too) is how the incident turned into such a huge story that it actually led the news.

As Timoner makes clear, Brand has an addictive personality. Whether it is drugs, yoga or sex, he tends to hurl himself headlong into whatever activity preoccupies him at any given moment. He is driven and ambitious but also restless in the extreme. Agents describe how quickly he became a movie star – but equally quickly left Hollywood behind him.

A Second Coming is likely to leave audiences with a mixture of admiration for and baffled exasperation with its subject. It shows Brand’s fitful brilliance but doesn’t downplay his narcissism or his unique ability to inspire and infuriate at exactly the same time.