Bella Thorne, American Cinema’s Last True Rock Star

For the vast majority of the public that was not able to physically attend the Sundance Film Festival this past week, the most compelling drama was not found onscreen in a mountainside auditorium. It was a multi-platform, multi-media experience playing out across Bella Thorne‘s assorted social media accounts as the prolific actress, singer-rapper, music video director, and all-around enfant terrible traveled to Park City to promote her latest starring vehicle Assassination Nation at its world premiere.

Saturday night, she posted an Instagram video of herself clad in one of her many wigs while packing for the festival. Sunday’s premiere appeared to go off without a hitch — until Monday night, when Page Six divulged that Thorne and her pals in attendance had been kicked out of the Park City Marriott just hours prior to the big event for allegedly smoking weed in their suite. For Thorne, this tale has a happy ending and a punch line; on Tuesday night, she posted a screenshot from industry rag Deadline announcing that upstart distributor NEON had purchased Assassination Nation for a cool ten million, the biggest buy at the festival. And by Thursday night, she was at home and back on Instagram, inviting fans to check out her guest appearance in a new music video and taking a quick puff from a massive blunt.

Just another week in the life of America’s leading controversy magnet. Ask anyone under the age of twenty how the Disney Channel alum went popularity supernova seemingly overnight and they might mention her reputation for being “real” and “unfiltered” and for “not giving an [insert unprintable word of choice].” It’s true that Thorne does all she does, with a flamboyant disregard for the dictates of celebrity propriety.

One minute, she’s pantomiming fellatio on a carrot in a music video from EDM person Borgore, and the next, she’s going nutso over hair products in a music video from suicide-streaming dingbat Logan Paul. She regularly appears on her Instagram in a state of partial undress, or smeared with glitter, or scrubbed free of makeup completely, evincing an uncommon vulnerability in all poses. When an online skeeze edited together a faux sex-tape leak of Thorne pleasuring herself in a car, “I don’t even masturbate like that!” was her instant-classic reply. She’s more committed to her career’s innocence-busting rebellion phase than a Selena Gomez or a Vanessa Hudgens; sure, they starred in Spring Breakers, but Thorne often appears to be living it. All of which is to say that, like so many stars before her, her greatest virtue of all is her skill at managing and coordinating her own image.

Her frequent antics have led harsher critics to style her as a Lohanian figure tumbling through a self-destructive spiral, but even a cursory survey of her career and life suggests something more collected and professional. Thorne fits a staggering amount of work into each calendar year, with five more movie projects on the docket after Assassination Nation, including Cannes-approved director Xavier Dolan’s hotly-anticipated The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. In 2017 alone, she appeared in a new season of the ongoing teen soap Famous in Love, four features, and four music videos, all while finding time to make her debut on the other side of the camera as the director of a video for her boyfriend, rapper Mod Sun.

She’s in full control of how she’s seen by the public; there have been no arrests, and all public nudity has been on her own terms. She had an air of steady self-possession when she shared her account of surviving sexual abuse in a gesture of solidarity for women pushing back against harassment. And even when she’s out on the town dressed like one of Batman’s more eccentric nemeses, she’s always willing to stop for a gesture of graciousness with a fan. To paraphrase the great philosopher Marco Rubio, let us dispense with this fiction that Bella Thorne doesn’t know what she’s doing. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Thorne brings a refreshing spontaneity and live-wire energy to a celebrity culture dominated by glorified brand managers, all of them telegenic and interchangeable and seemingly engineered in a lab for viral appeal. She’s made a cracking sport out of being a mess, a measure more dangerous than her post-Disney contemporaries and safely removed from the Winehouse model of self-immolation. While unmistakably a product of the Internet, her clear amusement at provoking pearl-clutchers harkens back to an era when irreverent young stars weren’t so concerned about dinging their follower count. She makes being famous look like the shameless hedonistic fun it ought to be. As social media blurs the divide between authentic and hyper-manufactured selves, her unruliness is nothing short of a beacon of hope. A dramatic statement, perhaps, but everything is drama where Thorne is concerned.

Charles Bramesco is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

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