Behind Electroboy, a name from the trend-setting music scene, hides the no less mysterious Florian Burkhardt, a man who has led multiple lives. Raised under strict Catholicism, he escaped to Los Angeles to become a movie star, instead finding fame as a model, then turning to artistic website design before suffering from a massive panic attack that left him locked up in a psychiatric hospital, and finally reinventing himself as a party organizer called Electroboy.

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It starts off like a Hollywood success story drowned in infancy, but turns into an intimate portrait of a very unusual man. Filmed during his daily life, as he walks his dog and chain smokes, the man behind Electroboy completely opens up to the camera of Marcel Gisler. There are stories like one of the agent who took advantage of him even as he was driven around Hollywood in a Cadillac, or the boyfriend who left him devastated. But despite all his confessions and the importance given to his very complex relationship with his parents, Electroboy remains unfathomable and opaque. In his gorgeous, ageless face, which graced the covers of so many magazines in the 80’s, there is a gulf into which the documentary itself seems to get lost. This level of mystery offers an unexpected strength to this uneven film, presented at the Semaine de la critique at Cannes.