David Weigel is a national political correspondent at The Post covering Congress and grass-roots political movements. He is the author of “The Show That Never Ends,” a history of progressive rock music.
In “Mister America,” a mockumentary that debuted last week on video on-demand, Heidecker plays “himself” on a quest to unseat San Bernardino District Attorney Vincent Rosetti, the man who prosecuted the case against him. Wearing a shapeless brown suit, and unshaven because it tested well with focus groups, he tries to talk his way onto the ballot the only way he knows how — ambling into public spaces and awkwardly interacting with voters.
He’s surprised when black voters don’t respond to his promise to make San Bernardino “like it used to be.” He insists that he’s a “legal expert” because he represented himself at trial. He promises to “eliminate crime throughout the entire region,” which he can surely do, because he’s an “outsider who wants to shake things up.”
Anyone who has covered a candidate who isn’t quite pulling things together will recognize this and cringe along. In an interview, Heidecker said he watched “Mitt,” “Weiner,” and “A Perfect Candidate” to get an idea of what campaigning was like. (The cringe level in “Mister America” approaches the part of “A Perfect Candidate” when Democratic Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb talks about himself to bored supermarket shoppers.)
“We decided early on that my candidate wouldn’t have any political infrastructure or organization around him, which made it very cost-effective; it was just me and my campaign manager, to convey this sort of bleakness, and that there was no chance that this guy is going to win,” Heidecker says. “The time’s wasting away, he’s losing, and he’s drinking in a hotel room. We didn’t want to create a sense that this was going to happen for him.”
Most people who run for office lose, and the also-rans have made good material for real-world documentaries. This year’s Netflix hit “Knock Down the House,” which follows now-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) victory alongside three insurgent challengers’ defeats, memorably portrayed the confidence and self-affirmation of candidates who aren’t going to make it. “Street Fight,” which captured now-Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) first, unsuccessful campaign for mayor of Newark, still gets mentioned in his stump speech.
But the fictionalized “Mister America” has no one to really root for. “Heidecker” is an egomaniac who thinks he can force Rosetti to debate him by standing in front of his car and live-streaming, then staging his own debate, which nobody else shows up for. He spends most of the time arguing with Gregg Turkington, who plays the perpetually ripped-off co-host of “On Cinema,” and showed up to argue that burning down Turkington’s film archive did not, in fact, give him “business experience.”
When Rosetti runs an ad against his actual opponent, instead of Heidecker, the candidate is distraught. “You don’t want negative press,” he explains, “but you want some acknowledge that you’re in the arena.”
It becomes clear, just a few scenes into the movie, that Heidecker is making a statement about Donald Trump. The president is never mentioned, but Heidecker (the real one) has made dark fun of him for years, recording an album of Trump songs with the only ballad ever written about Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
The onion-like “On Cinema” universe has turned “Heidecker” into the star of increasingly deranged, zero-budget action movies called “Decker,” with a hero {Jack Decker) who mutters about making America great again, sings his own patriotic music at karaoke and inevitably becomes president after uncovering a deep-state conspiracy against him. (It involves Dracula.)
"When I’m right down Freedom Road, agents on my tail,” Heidecker sings. “You wave a flag on Christmas Day, they’ll throw you in jail!”
In “Mister America,” all of that leads to failure — humiliating failure, the kind that should, but doesn’t, convince its hero never to ask for a public mandate. On a comedy tour last year, Heidecker shot some scenes of himself revving up crowds in front of a Trump-like campaign logo; he didn’t use any of this for the movie.
There are on-the-nose parodies of Trump everywhere, from cartoons to “Saturday Night Live” to bad stand-up acts. Heidecker’s opted instead to create a character who sees politics as a method of revenge and validation, and fails completely at it.
“[People] watching this movie see that politics right now is disgusting and totally removed from how the system should work,” Heidecker said. “We don’t need to spell that out. We don’t need to hit anybody over the head with that. We’re saying that in a better world, maybe the world we remember from not too long ago, that a character like this wouldn’t come anywhere near to power.”
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