Once a director gets classified as a provocateur, it’s a label that can be hard to shake off. Rick Alverson earned that title three years ago with The Comedy, his extremely uncomfortable (and funny) takedown of ironic detachment. In that film, Tim Heidecker played someone who thrived on being repulsive and confrontational, and it was easy to treat his character as a symbol for a specific, rotting part of today’s culture. Entertainment, Alverson’s follow-up, is another piece of provocation that will naturally get compared and contrasted with The Comedy; Heidecker returns to co-write the screenplay (and show up in a cameo), and Alverson continues showing off his knack for creating interactions that can have people crawling in agony towards the exits. But Entertainment provokes in a more insidious manner than The Comedy. If Alverson’s previous film focused on attacking character, stretching a protagonist’s “likability” to the breaking point and beyond (think of Heidecker’s character as less of an anti-hero and more of an asshole), then his latest work sets its sights on dismantling structure and narrative. That makes Entertainment feel more specific and less like a commentary or something symbolic, so it can be harder to glean what Alverson’s real intent might be with his increasingly surreal story. The results are murkier, for better and worse.

So it makes sense to cast someone like Gregg Turkington in the central role, a person whose career involves blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Turkington is known best as Neil Hamburger, a comedian who specializes in antihumour, taking familiar aspects of stand-up comedy and performance and aggressively going against expectations. But in recent years he’s also played “Gregg Turkington,” a version of himself that co-hosts the web series On Cinema, along with being involved in its spinoff Decker. In Entertainment, Turkington plays “The Comedian,” a stand-up travelling across the Mojave Desert with his act (an exact version of Turkington’s Neil Hamburger character). A young clown (Tye Sheridan) appears from time to time as an opener with his own baffling act, but The Comedian travels alone, making pit stops in between his performances to indifferent crowds. Alverson expectedly basks in every millisecond of painful silence that comes after Turkington/Hamburger barks out another one of his offensive jokes. Enjoying these scenes, and enjoying Entertainment as a whole, is largely a make or break affair; either you like Turkington’s brand of comedy or you don’t.

The majority of Entertainment plays out as a portrait of one man’s loneliness, with Turkington usually framed in a way that makes him look swallowed up by the desert landscapes (Lorenzo Hagerman’s cinematography is one of, if not the best parts of the film). His interactions with people are usually brief, except for a sequence where he visits a cousin (John C. Reilly) who’s too business-minded to comprehend what The Comedian’s purpose really is. A series of voicemails The Comedian makes to his daughter (who’s never seen or heard) throughout also provides a little bit of characterization, even if it feels like it’s there to make the character look like more of a desperate sad sack. It’s only until a meeting with a chromotherapist (Lotte Verbeek), followed by a brutal encounter with a drunk heckler (Amy Seimetz) that Alverson starts letting go of his formal grip on the film, providing one surreal encounter after another that escorts The Comedian from the purgatory of his desert tour to some sort of deranged, Lynchian hell. Levels of discomfort get ratcheted up considerably as The Comedian’s disdain of others, along with accepting his own pitiful existence, reach a fever pitch when he makes it to the final stop on his trip. Entertainment ends with the image of The Comedian laughing hysterically, which is both the character’s most expressive moment in the film and the point where Alverson lets go of the film’s connection to any form of reality. The Comedian’s eventual acceptance of his own existence as a punchline doesn’t land as strongly as it should, a result of Alverson’s tendency to create compelling scenes that stand on their own yet link together in an aimless fashion, but there’s something powerful in Entertainment’s ability to push down into the darkest depths without any hesitation. Alverson, whose singular style makes him one of US indie’s most important voices right now, confirms what The Comedy established three years ago: he’s a filmmaker brimming with potential, but for the time being someone to watch rather than behold.

For fans of independent films, now might be the time to feel vindicated. The transition from the realm of indie to the studio system isn’t a new concept by any means, but in the last several years cutting one’s teeth on the festival circuit has become very lucrative for some directors. Gareth Edwards went from making the low-budget Monsters in 2010 to helming the Godzilla reboot 4 years later (and in doing so went from a 6-figure budget to a 9-figure one); Marc Webb leapt from the twee (500) Days of Summer to taking over Sony’s Spider-Man reboot The Amazing Spider-Man; James Gunn went from R-rated genre fare to handling Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy; Rian Johnson, who already made a big leap from Brick to Looper, launched into the stratosphere when he was picked to direct the 8^th episode of Star Wars; and most recently, Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow followed up his début with none other than Jurassic World. The glamour of Hollywood is merging with the not so glamorous world of DIY filmmaking, and it’s clearly working out for both the directors and the studios.

It’s natural to wonder how the influx of relatively new directors from festivals like Sundance or SXSW might change the blandness of Hollywood tentpoles, but it might be better to start asking about the other side of this equation. What does this mean for independent films, and will it change the way we perceive indies? Independent films don’t have an industry as vast or profitable as the studios, which means that the indie “system” is much more malleable and, therefore, easier to change.

And it’s evident that, despite the financial success of films like Jurassic World and Godzilla, artistic success is hard to find in this new trend. The boundaries between mainstream and independent have been slowly merging together, but the entire idea of indie has been about separating from the mainstream, and providing an alternative to films designed by committee. What’s happening now is a slow, disparaging shift in what indie means, and an increase in power and control for Hollywood. Indie directors aren’t infiltrating the system; they’re being devoured by it.

Jurassic World and Godzilla

That hasn’t always been the case. The early ’90s saw the success stories of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. For those three filmmakers, their situation was the ideal. Rather than adapt themselves to the status quo, they were able to apply their distinct styles on a bigger scale. But the film industry is a different beast today. Tarantino, Rodriguez and Smith directed their own original stories and didn’t work with a massive budget. Today, directors are getting scooped up to take over other people’s properties, and the budgets go well past 100 million. It’s nice to think that a certain filmmaker’s unique or irreverent style might successfully port over to the sequel/prequel/reboot/adaptation/etc. blockbuster, but it’s not likely. Investors would be insane to hand over that amount of cash to someone who’s only worked with a small fraction of that money.

All someone has to do is watch what’s been released so far to see how much these director’s distinct qualities from their earlier work(s) have been drowned out by the wants and needs of those truly running the show. Watch Godzilla, or James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” with directorial trademarks. Gunn may have been able to cast Michael Rooker in a supporting role—a part that could have gone to anyone and no one would have blinked—but Guardians follows a very clear, familiar and formulaic path, one that also helped Marvel continue building the overall story for their massively successful franchise. It didn’t come as a huge surprise when rumours started that Edgar Wright, one of the best genre filmmakers working today, bailed on Ant-Man because Marvel wanted a Marvel movie, not an Edgar Wright movie.

So this brings me back to the first question I asked: What does this mean for independent films? What this new trend has done is turn film festivals like Sundance and SXSW—places designed to celebrate and promote distinct, independent voices—into training grounds for the next studio workman (with extra emphasis on man, as Jessica Ritchey points out). Now, indie features act as showreels or auditions, with people speculating over which directors will get hurled into the maw of the next big-budget property. And by putting the emphasis on this, it pushes the truly independent American filmmakers working today—the Andrew Bujalskis, the Josephine Deckers, the Rick Alversons, the Alex Ross Perrys, the Sean Bakers, the Nathan Silvers, and the Matthew Porterfields, to name a few—even further into the fringe. People look at the trajectories of people like Trevorrow, Edwards, Johnson, Webb, Gunn and others as a sign of indie taking over the mainstream, but it’s more like the mainstream assimilating the indie universe. The pockets of Hollywood studios may be getting bigger, but the opportunity for discovering and supporting groundbreaking new talents appears to be getting smaller with every year.

Fans of awkward comedy will get a lot more than they bargained for with Rick Alverson’s The Comedy, a hilarious and tragic character study that brutally tears apart the worst aspects of hipster culture. Swanson (Tim Heidecker), a 35 year old depressed hipster who’s about to inherit his dying father’s estate, spends most of his time doing nothing of substance. Living on a yacht outside of the city, when he’s not hanging out with his friends (which include LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Heidecker’s sidekick Eric Wareheim) he’s interacting with strangers abrasively.

The first scene where we actually meet Swanson (after a very homoerotic opening scene) is him berating a male nurse taking care of his father. The nurse quietly takes Swanson’s questions about prolapsed anuses and going to “nurse school” with other women before leaving. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but it’s only the first of many scenes like it. Soon after, Swanson sees gardeners working on a house and pretends to be working with them, but when his attempts to rile up the homeowners fail he drops the act altogether. It’s evident that Swanson only thrives off of generating conflicts because, with no other skills or interests in his life, it makes him feel relevant.

The rest of The Comedy mostly unfolds in an episodic fashion, with Heidecker generating more awkward situations or partying with his friends. The lack of any real movement in the storyline might be one of (many) things that’ll turn people off from the film, but calling The Comedy lacking would be missing Alverson’s point. Shows that have used ‘cringe comedy’ over the years like The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm enjoy watching people squirm their way out of situations they either unwittingly put themselves in or are forced to handle. Swanson is doing neither of these things as he’s the one instigating and encouraging conflict. With such little plot the only thing viewers can focus on is Swanson’s bitter, hateful behaviour.

Heidecker, giving one of the year’s best performances, is able to maintain interest without giving an inch towards making Swanson someone deserving of sympathy. Things are played mostly on the surface level here, but Heidecker easily communicates how depressed Swanson really is without being overt about it. By the end it feels like Swanson is merely trapped in a cycle of his own creation where he pisses other people off only because it’s what he’s used to.

People who know Heidecker from his work on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! might expect The Comedy to be similar to his work on TV, but they’d be wrong in making that assumption. While there are some truly funny scenes, The Comedy is mainly about the toxicity of the ironic, detached behaviour that’s so popular with hipsters (Alverson’s choice to cast people associated with hipsters seems like a deliberate one to ensure his film is seen by the right people). After spending 90 minutes with characters like Swanson and his friends, no one will want to resemble them in any way whatsoever. That alone makes The Comedy a success.