Mainstream: ‘Grotesque’ Andrew Garfield film that prompted mass festival walkouts finally available in UK

His performance has been compared to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker

An Andrew Garfield film that prompted festival walkouts is finally available to stream in the UK.

The film, titled Mainstream, sees the British actor take on his boldest role yet as a YouTuber obsessed with fame.

Directed by Gia Coppola, the film satirises the lifestyle of online celebrities and features many scenes that ruffled feathers when it first debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 2020.

Despite Garfield’s “grotesque” performance being praised, critics were left shocked by the actor’s “go-for-broke horrendousness”.

IndieWire said Garfield’s character is “one of the most obnoxious ever”, and described him as being “the grotesque lovechild of Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison in The Doors and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker”. 

Mainstream divided critics, with Variety describing it as “a messy, childish scrawl of a film”.

The film, which co-stars Stranger Things actor Maya Hawke, Nat Wolff, Johny Knoxville and Jason Schwartzman, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 33 per cent – but this hasn’t stopped Garfield’s UK fans from wanting to see the film.

It’s now available to buy on Prime Video for £7.99. It’s uncertain when it was added.

Andrew Garfield in ‘Mainstream’

(IFC Films)

Coppola is the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, the man behind the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now.

Mainstream was released in the US in May 2021. Garfield followed up the film with roles in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, tick, tick... BOOM!, Spider-Man: No Way Home and TV series Under the Banner of Heaven.