In the Moscow Times’ obituary for Eduard Limonov, who died four years ago aged 77, writer Mark Galeotti summed up the poet-turned-politician in two simple sentences: “Was Limonov a visionary or a poser, an artist or a politician, a leftist or a rightist? The answer to all of them is, of course, yes.” This is key to understanding Kirill Serebrennikov’s latest movie, a boundary-blasting biopic that simply drips with punk-rock energy, revealing everything and nothing about a slippery character whose modus operandi was reinvention from the get-go and for whom consistency really was the hobgoblin of small minds.
