Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Both are patchworky and imperfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.

Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs story in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything he has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, and standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, this opening scene is both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall full of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.

Luna’s Michael is the straight man in this comedy, which has the doppelganger competing with a French-accented Charlie Chaplin for Marilyn’s affections, and smoking a blunt in a mudbath with a Madonna and a Pope. Obviously, the idea of Michael Jackson’s persona as something to aspire to, his image as a shell to hide a real self in, is really fucked up. In crafting the character’s arc, Korine ignores the specifics of the real MJ’s obsession with royalty/wealth, his constant self-reconstruction, his problematic sexuality (with the Michael/Marilyn narrative thread, Korine makes it pretty clear that this Jackson is emphatically heterosexual), in order to fuse all of these strands into Michael Jackson as a symbol of immortality and eternal rebirth. “You can live forever!” Michael promises the oblivious French nursing home patients he’s paid to entertain. All of the impersonators, it seems, are living life as a race against decay––Marilyn even pitches the commune to Michael as “a place where no one ages”––but we get the sense that Michael, apparently unsullied by bitterness or regret, is the one who has the best shot at living the dream.

The story of the impersonators makes up just about two-thirds of Mister Lonely; the rest is given over to a seemingly unrelated subplot set in South America, in which Werner Herzog leads a band of nuns who learn to fly. “The Lord wants to see us dance through the sky,” says one nun to the others. Meanwhile, back at the commune, the Pope toasts his fellow impersonators, “We have become what we wished we were.” Very, very loosely, both sections are about transcending the everyday and fulfilling a higher calling through ecstatic absurdity. I think.

It’s hard not to feel like any read of a Harmony Korine film is an overreach. A notorious and prodigious liar, he’s got an undeniable knack for getting his adoring press to happily swallow bullshit. It never ceases to amaze me how so many of his interviewers will take his apparent lies at face value (how many times have you seen his line about living with the Malingerers cult reported without a trace of skepticism?), even while relating Korine’s gleeful admissions of lying about other things (see the latest issue of PAPER Magazine, in which Korine says he often tells cab drivers that he directed The Shawshank Redemption). Making movies just seems to be an extension of his primary goal of slipping in and out of identities, of nailing us before we can nail him. I know this, and yet I throw up my hands and give in to it, because with Mister Lonely, the process and the product seem to fuse. Consider me suckered.