Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields

On camera, celebrity fan Sarah Silver­man describes the seemingly affectless, deeply literate music of Merritt and his cult-loved band the Magnetic Fields as that of ”a poet inside a mean outer shell to protect it.” A laconic, noodling documentary, Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields pecks gently at that shell but makes little effort to get underneath. The affectionate, bemused, structurally unkempt portrait is at its best capturing Merritt?s close collaboration with his longtime friend and bandmate Claudia Gonson. B-

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