Thumbs up for NUTS!

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It’s too early to suggest that NUTS! will be a seminal work in the career of documentary filmmaker Penny Lane, assistant professor of art and art history. But reviews pouring in from the Sundance Film Festival, where Lane recently premiered the story of goat testicle transplant pioneer Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, have roundly praised the movie.

“When I found Brinkley’s story,” Lane told Sundance, “I thought it was readymade for a film. His biography is a tragedy — it’s a classic American story of someone who was born with nothing and, through his own hard work and genius, works his way to the top, then falls in this very spectacular way.”

Claiming that he could cure male impotence by transplanting goat testicles into his many hopeful patients, Brinkley used his quackery to erect a media empire and nearly rose to the governor’s office in Kansas.

But delve any further into the biography of John Brinkley and you’ll find that fact and fiction fuse. Lane has used a creative combination of archival material and animation to tell that unreliable yet entertaining story, and the critics have responded. Here’s a sample.

Lane, whose last success was the inside-the-White-House found-footage collage Our Nixon, is offering catnip for audiences of a certain type. For those who listen to They Might Be Giants, play along with NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and subscribe to Mental Floss, Nuts! is their Star Wars. But you don’t need to be a bookish dweeb with your hands up at Barnes and Noble readings to enjoy it.
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Lane employs a squadron of animators to tell Brinkley’s story, using his authorized biography as her template — up until the moment she stops, artfully turning the story on its head. The results are a glorious look at the American dream running head-first into innocent gullibility.
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As illuminating as it is immensely entertaining, Penny Lane’s doc uses charming hand-crafted animation to trace how Brinkley ballooned a wacko epiphany into a vast media empire built on nothing but hot air. It’s a chronicle of the American dream in action, and the fact that it’s all true didn’t stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year’s fest.
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Lane primarily relies on various styles of animation to tell Brinkley’s story, but more importantly, she frames that story on Clement Wood’s biography The Life of a Man: A Biography of John R. Brinkley. Using this as the narrative framework almost makes you feel like you’ve stumbled into a museum dedicated to Brinkley’s greatness, but if you’re patient with NUTS!, you’ll get a reveal worthy of a true swindler.
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Watch Lane discuss the film on the , and keep an eye out for your chance to see NUTS! later this year.