Review: 'Maddie's Secret' won't be one for long it's the indie arrival of the year

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Set us as preferred Sometimes a movie’s conception of a character can be so spot-on — so gloriously accurate and emotionally true — it can carry you beyond mere plot and deliver you to a place of pure recognition: I know her.So it is with Maddie, an extremely online Los Angeles striver, blond tendrils of hair hanging in her face along with the need, deep in her eyes, to become a food influencer.

You can hear it in the way she pronounces tortang talong or yuzu kosho crisp.This is a person who squeals when unboxing her favorite condiments (Fly by Jing, if you must know).It doesn’t matter that Maddie is played by a man — or rather, it matters entirely when that man is John Early, the unfairly gifted comedian, TV star and off-Broadway actor who also wrote and directed “Maddie’s Secret,” his first feature.

Early loves his creation, enough to spin an entire psychodrama around her, one that will bring her high and low.But the best compliment I can pay Early is that, while you never quite unsee his jawline and strategic padding, his total commitment is such that it swings you over.Divine did this, immortally, in John Waters’ films.

You’re watching something that can’t be achieved solely by realism.Don’t call it drag (Early doesn’t) — it’s more like channeling, bringing a desperate creature to life by dint of compassion.

You stop thinking about it.Movies Opening the third annual edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, the comedy darling’s sincere melodrama is also bracingly funny.Maddie jogs around her Echo Park neighborhood (these locations are sharply scouted) and reports to work at a warehouse-like content farm and test kitchen called Gourmaybe, where she dreams of being elevated from lowly dishwasher to recipe deviser or maybe even on-camera talent.

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