Film review Whishaw's rebel poet turned raging militant drives exhilarating biopic

Fascism, punk, euphoria and despair... it's all here, or mostly, in this hilarious biopic of Eduard Limonov (a pen name taken from the Russian word limonka, slang for grenade), the rock'n'roll émigré Russian writer who wound up poverty-stricken in New York at about the same time as Sid Vicious.

- Peter Bradshaw

Limonov, a patriot-dissident, became an angry bohemian, a sexual outlaw, and a celebrated adulte terrible in French literary circles in the 80s, railing against the prissy liberals and mincing hypocrites. Then he returned to Russia and became the leader of a violent group called the National Bolshevik party. Tactfully, nobody here points out the similarity to "national socialist party". It was as if someone had given Michel Houellebecq a machine gun.

Ben Whishaw gives a glorious performance as Limonov - funny, dour, crazy, sexy, boiling with unhappiness and apparently bipolar. The character is maybe always worried that his writing is not good enough to make him immortal, and that posing, PR, situationist outrage and political violence is his real vocation.

Inevitably, his autobiographical fictions are compared by a New York publisher to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Limonov says he hasn't seen that film) but he winds up being a grizzled conflation of Ed Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club.