On March 11th, 2017, John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky debuted at SXSW. The film was a vehicle for the late character actor Harry Dean Stanton, and follows Stanton as the 90-year-old eponymous hero who goes on a modest odyssey through small town Piru, California, all while reckoning with his own mortality. Four years later, Todd Stephens’ Swan Song arrives at SXSW Online, and stars German character actor Udo Kier as the not-quite-90-but-certainly-south-of-70 Patrick Pitsenbarger, a former hairdresser who must venture across small town Sandusky, Ohio, and find a way to sparkle in his life’s twilight phase.

I mention the former film not to discount the latter—and I promise I’ll review Swan Song before the end of this—but I can’t help acknowledging a kindred connection between the two films; a recurring theme that makes itself known through cinema for a reason. Like the rest of us, actors grow old and they die. We may think that some of them are practically immortal, the way their images ingrain themselves on screen and in our heads, but in reality, the opposite is probably true: an actor’s filmography is aging made dramatically visual. Stanton had a career that spanned more than six decades, and while he was known for his supporting roles and rarely ever assuming the lead, his gruff but also gentle and empathetic presence was unforgettable throughout countless films. He ended up passing in 2017 just seven months after Lucky was released. The film was his swan song.

Kier is only 76 at the time of this writing, and Swan Song seems far from his last film (he has a film titled Haymaker currently in post-production), but he shares much in common with Hollywood’s zen rebel. He has been working almost six decades, he is infamous for his work with cult directors, and he has always attracted the smaller, more eccentric or off-kilter roles.

That the starring roles in films like Lucky and Swan Song should arrive for both these actors seems like no coincidence. Lucky was conceived from the very beginning for Stanton, and while Stephens wrote his character with inspiration from a very real figure he encountered during his childhood, Kier jumped to his mind specifically when it came time to cast. Both Stanton and Kier are recognizable enough to draw studio interest, but both are also “underground” enough and amenable enough to working with a smaller budget and not letting their off-screen egos get in the way of a compelling character. Both were also clearly willing to confront their limited times on Earth with films that tell of life’s denouement. And how fortunate are we that they dared to go there. If these actors can age like us and go gracefully into the beyond, then so can we.

But let’s talk about Swan Song with that review I promised, because we are also very fortunate to have Kier alive and delivering career-defining work for us today. Kier’s Pat—or, “Mr. Pat” (his drag-sona)—simultaneously has none of Kier in him and all of Kier in him. Kier has played everything from a staunch vampire council member in 1998’s Blade, to a mind-controlling Soviet dictator in the Command & Conquer video games, neither of which could have predicted his turn here as a flamboyant, jewelry-clad hairdresser. But Kier also has that unmistakable air of mysticism—like his mind is traversing multiple dimensions—and those eyes, those steely, penetrating eyes. His roles are diverse, but his essence is always that of the singular, saturnine, and mercurial Udo Kier.

As it turns out, Pat is quintessential Kier: a weathered and beleaguered grey-hair who is alone and has resigned himself, however begrudgingly, to a nursing home in the quaint and corn-fed Midwest. He was once Sandusky’s premier hair stylist, the man all the rich socialites went to when they wanted to look drop-dead gorgeous for their social engagements, but a prodigé of his (the perfectly cast Jennifer Coolidge as Dee Dee Dale) opened up her own salon and ran him out of business. Still, Pat keeps his motor skills sharp by obsessively folding napkins, and he sneaks in the little delights of his salad days, such as his Mores cigarillos. One day, Pat is summoned by an estate agent to style the hair of a deceased client, the exceedingly wealthy Rita Parker-Sloan. And so, with only three dollars, his golden shears, and some cigarillos to his name, Pat sets off in Sandusky on foot to fulfill what feels like his own dying wish.

Pat’s journey, like many small town yarns, is filled with quirky encounters, assistance from unexpected sources, and comical misunderstandings between generations. Swan Song is a tender and straightforward story, but there are undercurrents of simmering emotion that lace every patch collected on this quilt of Americana. Because Pat once worked with such renown, the older generation continues to hold him in high regards, and even the younger generation—a group of jump rope-playing kids and the fresh-faced bartender at the local gay bar, for example—are happy to oblige Pat and warmly meet him half way. Emotional terrain gets steep for Pat when he recalls images of his husband, David, whom he lost to AIDS many years ago. In separate scenes, Pat visits David’s burial site and then the land on which their home used to exist, and Kier gives us heart wrenching, deeply felt moments of a quivering, broken man who has been left to his lonesome.

But Swan Song is really about re-emerging from the ashes of the past, and about the re-discovering of the fabulous “Mr. Pat” (Pat getting his groove back, if you will). Pat is a larger than life figure, and while his life in the nursing home at the film’s beginning has him hiding his cigarillo smoking and throwing nothing more than a little sassy disdain at his orderlies, his adventure back into Sandusky puts the wind back under his wings and the style back in his step. Pat gets a flowery pink hat from a new salon in town; Pat obtains $20 from the estate agent and treats himself to a premium glass of wine; Pat dances to Robyn’s queer anthem “Dancing On My Own.” But Stephens harnesses a sometimes-shaky handheld camera to follow along with all of these exploits, reminding us that for every confident step Pat takes forward, he is also one step closer to the end of his road.

But in the end, what makes Swan Song so special are the little details: Pat mixing his cigarillo ashes with alcohol to make a volumizer; the fact that the late David, like his husband Pat, also used to work with his hands as a gardener; the one-liners – “bury her with bad hair.” Beyond the character study that takes place, Stephens’ script even works in some sly commentary on the shifting socio-economics of small town America. For example, the colourful dive bar where Pat used to perform his drag is being bought out to make way for a craft brewpub. Later, Pat observes two married men playing with their children carefree in a park and he remarks, “I wouldn’t even know how to be gay anymore.”

When he’s not thinking about David, Pat laments that the world has changed and that no one will remember him after he’s gone – a sentiment undoubtedly shared by anyone running out of sand. Bittersweet observations like these crop up all along the way when we realize that our stories, when you think about it, are deceptively simple. Stories are about journeys from point A to point B. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Starting at one point and finishing at another. The important thing Pat discovers—and Lucky before him—is that we can stray off from the points laid out for us and find the best bits of ourselves as we do so. There are so many other letters in the alphabet, even in the later stages of life. Just like in the scene in which Pat stumbles into a clothing store, is gifted a stunning pastel green pantsuit, and declared “The Liberace of Sandusky.”

Near the end of Lucky, Harry Dean Stanton (who, by the way, watches Liberace on VHS earlier in his film) gives an inspired speech to some bar patrons in which he shares his similar revelations about life. When the owner of the bar asks him what we’re supposed to do in light of such grim sentences—your story coming to an end at point B and everything moving on without you—Stanton’s Lucky responds, “you smile.” Kier’s Pat in Swan Song does you one further: he puts on his best outfit, his shiniest sequins, his most iced-out rings, and he dances. The swan’s song is a little extra.

SXSW 2021 | No Split Ends in the Spotlight As "Swan Song" Models After "Lucky"