"Maddie's Secret," the directorial debut of actor, musician, and outré comedy godhead John Early, is both unlike a film you've ever seen and a lot like a lot of films you've probably seen. It strikes the serious tone of a 1990s afterschool special while employing the type of camp humor that Early excels at. And it manages to be both archly hilarious and emotionally profound. (Last weekend, it also became the IFC Center's biggest opening release in two years, and its sixth biggest of all time.)
The movie, which Early also wrote, follows Maddie—played by Early in soft-glow drag—through a journey amid the bowels of legacy media, social-video fame, and the repercussions of trying to make it in a cutthroat world. Maddie is a prep chef in a big publication's test kitchen (which seems a lot like that of pre-reckoning Bon Appétit) who labors sweatily alongside her lusty best friend, Deena (an exceptionally funny Kate Berlant). But Maddie's formidable talents in the kitchen are wasted behind the scenes, and when she gets a chance to show off her recipe-invention skills, she thinks her food influencer dreams are coming true—that is, until her eating disorder starts to manifest among the pressures of working in front of the camera and competing with a coworker (played by Claudia O'Doherty) who basically wants her dead.
Early was inspired to make this surprisingly earnest tragicomedy in part due to "Kate's Secret," a 1986 TV movie starring Meredith Baxter in which that titular character's seemingly perfect suburban life hides her calamitous struggle with bulimia. While Early is well known for his masterful grasp of camp and his fulsome portrayals of women characters, "Maddie's Secret" strikes a new tone—one that indulges his great empathy while capitalizing on his ability to shift conventional wisdom.
It's truly a weird movie in the most beautiful way, and any old-millennial latchkey kid who glued themselves to the television in the hours between school and their single mom getting home from work will recognize it immediately. As Early told Hell Gate about writing the film, "I thought I was doing this fun, kind of melodramatic tone for me and my friends to live in. And it was fun, but I immediately gave over to the emotion in it, and before I knew it I was like, 'Is this funny at all?' I just fully bought in and was like, 'I love Maddie, I want to protect her.'"