Brand: A Second Coming

An energetic doc about Essex's manky Mockney messiah.

Whatever value there is in seeing a major British media celebrity, who was briefly on track to become a Hollywood star as well, embrace openly radical positions, Brand has delivered that in full.

Nearly two hours in his company is at least an hour too much.

Brand is incapable of the focus for anything deeper than tactics of charm, glibness, and shock.

Whether you agree with his system-damning rhetoric or see him as no better than anyone else in our clogged punditocracy, "Brand: A Second Coming" is, if not a careful portrait, at least an orgy of personality.

Timoner's doc seems at its best when asking if a person can grow up, atone for their mistakes, lead people to think and make them laugh, all at the same time and in public.

Timoner seems reluctant to probe Brand and consequently offers little in the way of revelation.

In the end, the film keeps going round in circles, never quite nailing Brand or making a convincing case for why he matters.

Like The Emperor's New Clothes, A Second Coming gets your brain buzzing.

You're left with the sense that Brand might yet be the subject of a great documentary, but he'd probably have to be on the other side of the planet while it was being made.

Brand emerges as exasperating company - variously intelligent, amusing and insufferable - but Noel Gallagher steals the show, declaring that he'll only buy into Brand's revolution if he can be the Duke of Manchester.

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