Flag Day brings emotional intensity to the real-life story of an American con-man

► Flag Day is in UK cinemas now. 

With Flag Day, Sean Penn returned to 2021’s Cannes Film Festival, five years after his previous directorial entry there, The Last Face (2016), was virtually laughed off the screen. This time it was a double entry: his first film as director where he also plays the male lead. And just to make it even more personal, it co-stars his daughter Dylan as the main character’s daughter in the film, with her brother Hopper as his son.

Adapted by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth from Jennifer Vogel’s 2001 memoir Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life, Flag Day marks a striking improvement over its predecessor – not least for the emotive intensity Sean and Dylan Penn bring to their characters’ troubled, toxic but compulsively intimate relationship. And if there are touches of grandstanding to Penn père’s performance, it’s appropriate enough when playing a man whose whole existence draws on his scruffy lop-sided grin and show-offy scam-artist charm. He can also turn on the pathos when it suits him: as Jennifer (who narrates in voice-over) reflects, “Dad had been so skilled at sounding those finely-tuned notes of sorrow and releasing them at the perfect moment to achieve impact.”

Acting laurels, though, go to Dylan Penn as Jennifer, whose layered performance brings out all the conflicted emotions – the attraction, the resentment, the anger, the appalled fascination with her dad’s self-glorifying audacity – even as she’s tempted towards the same dark seductive pitfalls that finally engulf him. Frequent (indeed perhaps rather too frequent) flashbacks to her childhood recall the wild antics and uproarious fun he brought to her life and that of her brother, not least his delight in dressing up for his birthday which coincides with Flag Day (June 14, a public holiday in the US), as if the celebrations were a tribute to him alone.

Here and there the film wastes its resources: Eddie Marsan is thrown away in a two-minute appearance as an evasive scientist whom Jennifer, by now an investigative journalist, is interviewing, and Hopper Penn as her brother is granted little more than a walk-on role. But what fuels the action is the troubled, touching father-daughter interplay, as Jennifer gradually comes to realise how John deceives not only all those around him but also himself. Posing as an “entrepreneur” with “a very broad portfolio”, his schemes grow perversely ever more grandiose after each successive collapse. His final scam, we’re told, involved the forging of $22m-worth of banknotes. But for all the emotional damage he’s caused, she can’t bring herself to hate him, and it’s that ambiguous love that lies at the heart of the film.