In theaters since Wednesday, “Dogman” follows an outsider who finds salvation in the love his dogs have for him. In the shoes of this left behind, we find the American actor Caleb Landry Jones. Back on his journey.
After being previewed at the Deauville Festival and selected in competition at the Venice Festival, Dogman has now been available in theaters since September 27. The film marks Luc Besson’s return to directing, four years after Anna and the accusations of rape and sexual assault against him, which resulted in a dismissal of the case.
Like Léon and Nikita, Dogman features a marginal and isolated character who thirsts for revenge. We follow Douglas, a man abused as a child, who has become disabled since his father shot him, and whose only company is a multitude of canines.
If criticism is divided on this new opus by the French filmmaker, everyone agrees to praise the performance of its main performer, Caleb Landry Jones, whom the JDD describes as “stunning intelligence and subtlety”while the FranceInfo site finds it “admirable” and that Le Parisien underlines that it “Stunning as it is sometimes moving, frightening, disturbing”.
This isn’t the first time Caleb Landry Jones’ play has been applauded. Originally from Texas, with a father who was a construction entrepreneur and a mother who was an educator, he appeared for the first time on screen in No Country For Old Men in 2007: he was one of the two teenagers on bicycles that Javier Bardem met in the end of the movie. We then meet him in Breaking Bad and The Social Network but it was with the horrific The Last Exorcism in 2010 that he got his first real role.
After the series Friday Night Lights, where he played the drummer of the group Crucifictorious led by Jesse Plemons, Caleb Landry Jones made his first foray into the blockbuster in 2011 with X-Men: The Beginning. Alongside Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence, he plays the superhero Banshee (the Howler in French).
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But it is within US independent cinema that he prospers: his singular physique allows him to be both angelic and disturbing. He thus cracks the vampire Saoirse Ronan in Byzantium by Neil Jordan and plays Xavier Dolan’s deceased lover in Tom on the Farm. Then he launched into an unusual business: the sale of viruses that had infected celebrities in Antiviral, the first feature film by David Cronenberg’s son. After donning a soldier’s uniform for John Boorman (Queen and Country), the actor plays a drug-addicted drifter in Mad Love in New York (2014) by the Safdie brothers.
2017 is a good year for him: we see him in The Florida Project, the phenomenon Get Out – he plays the white supremacist brother-in-law of the hero –, Barry Seal: American Traffic worn by Tom Cruise, the multi-award winning 3 Billboards: The revenge panels and finally the highly anticipated season 3 of Twin Peaks, where he is the violent husband of Amanda Seyfried.
Productions that remained unpublished in France followed (Tyrel, To the Night, Viena and the Fantomes), before rediscovering him in 2019 in The Dead Don’t Die by Jim Jarmusch. Thanks to the latter, he came into contact with the label Sacred Bones Records and released his first album the following year, The Mother Stonebetween psychedelic rock and folk.
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Nitram
In 2021, he lends his voice to a robot in Finch, Tom Hanks’ companion in misfortune in a post-apocalyptic world. But it was especially with Nitram that he made a name for himself that year. Inspired by the Port Arthur massacre which occurred in Tasmania in 1996, the feature film paints the portrait of an outsider who turns into a mass killer. Caleb Landry Jones’ performance earned him the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
With Dogman, he plays another misfit role. The first few minutes of the film show him in drag, wearing a pink dress and platinum wig, and wearing dripping makeup, like some kind of distant cousin to Todd Phillips’ Joker. A relationship that the public, like the press, did not fail to highlight.
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Dogman
“Dogman owes a lot to Caleb Landry Jones. We needed an actor who could embody the desire, the power, the melancholy, the trials of this complex and fascinating character”, declares Luc Besson in the press kit for the film. A successful bet for the actor.