In real life, Jesco White is a famed practitioner of Appalachian ‘mountain dancing’, a dizzyingly fleet-footed blend of clog- and tap-dancing. Thanks to a life lived on the wilder margins, he is also something of an underground counter-culture icon (hence the production involvement of hipper-than-thou lifestyle magazine Vice in this film, which was written by its founders, Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti). Directed by Dominic Murphy, this is a wild, radical and riveting fantasy biopic, which spins White’s notoriety into a sort of hallucinatory parable, beginning close to reality but shifting further and further into a grisly, poetic allegory for the damage wrought by poverty, mental illness and substance abuse. We begin with Jesco’s troubled childhood in poverty-stricken Boone County, in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia. Briliantly played first by young Owen Campbell and then by Edward Hogg, the young Jesco is endlessly in and out of reform schools, where he hones his violent temper as well as his addiction to gasoline. Only his huffing habit and the solid support of his dancer daddy Donte Ray White sustain him through the fairly constant dark times. As a scarred and disturbed but charismatic adult, Jesco becomes celebrated as a local entertainer; but his shaky grasp on sanity takes a knock when his beloved father is murdered. The next object of Jesco’s somewhat obsessive affection is Cilla (Carrie Fisher), a considerably older lady who picks Jesco up in her car one night and promptly decides to leave her husband and family for him… For a time, it seems as though true love and untrammelled creativity might save Jesco from himself; but when doubt and suspicion begin to creep into his treasured relationship with Cilla, and with his father’s killers still on the loose, Jesco begins to submit to the fantasy of himself as some Biblical force of vengeance … and his internal reality and external behaviour both take some seriously scary turns. Like Jesco’s dancing, this film is a compelling blend of grace and mania – a full-tilt freakout which pays adoring tribute to its one-off protagonist whilst simultaneously turning him into a figure of unforgettably grotesque nightmare.