Boy finds his pack in dogs and drag queens
“DogMan” is an example of why March and April are such good months for movies. The film isn’t commercial and could never compete with the summer blockbusters, and it’s not Oscar bait, so forget about releasing it in the fall. Rather, it’s an idiosyncratic, bizarre, out-ofnowhere and completely nuts picture that somebody really wanted to make.
That somebody is Luc Besson, the French filmmaker behind “The Fifth Element” (1997) and “Lucy” (2014). He wrote and directed “DogMan,” about a lonely, straight drag queen who lives inside an abandoned school building with a pack of highly intelligent and devoted dogs.
As the movie begins, DogMan, also known as Douglas, is decked out like Marilyn Monroe and is transporting dozens of dogs in his truck. The police stop him and arrest him, and we get most of what follows in flashback as he tells his story to a police psychiatrist (Jojo T. Gibbs).
Caleb Landry Jones, who plays DogMan, is not a famous name, though he’s had colorful roles in major movies (“Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri,” “Get Out”). Yet even if you were paying close attention to him, you wouldn’t necessarily expect him to be capable of what he does here. Jones holds the screen with the magnetism of a movie star, radiating an appealing aura of amused equanimity, something like a non-evil version of Heath Ledger’s Joker in “The Dark Knight.” As a viewer, you want to be around him, and that’s important, because the character he plays easily could have been portrayed as a repellent figure. The movie itself might have been repellent without Jones’ relaxed, almost philosophical quality.
The story is that, when he was a child, young Douglas offended his brutal, stupid father, who forced him to live for years in a cage with dogs. This misfortune developed Douglas’ uncanny ability for canine communication. Later, when that period ended in violence, Douglas was sent to a boarding school, where he discovered a love for Shakespeare and a devotion to a somewhat older and extremely extroverted girl who also lived there.
The combination of elements in “DogMan” is bracingly weird. There’s Shakespeare, there’s a touch of “Dr. Dolittle” and a young lover. There’s also a gang going around shaking down small businesses in an urban neighborhood, a bona fide shootout, a side story involving the psychiatrist and her dangerous ex-husband, and — why not? — a few drag performances. (Douglas is welcomed into a fold of drag artists and does an impassioned Édith Piaf one week, and later performs Marlene Dietrich singing “Lili Marleen.”) “DogMan” won’t appeal to everybody, but there’s something to be said for a movie that makes you wonder if the filmmaker has gone crazy.
There’s also something to be said for a movie that could have made more money had the filmmaker dumbed it down. With a slight change in emphasis, the story of a traumatized boy who develops an ability to communicate with dogs could have been pushed into a superhero formula. Instead, “DogMan” is its own unique thing.
By the way, the dogs in “DogMan” are very cute, even the Doberman. In several instances, characters react with fear to the dogs that are supposed to be menacing, but they look harmless. It’s hard to say if this is a mistake on Besson’s part, or if he just thought it would be funny to have people quaking at the sight of placid dogs. “DogMan” is nutty enough that the latter is actually possible.