The Life of Sean DeLear

Overview

A blazingly colorful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles’ underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. I Could Not Believe It joyously chronicles the experiences of a young Black, queer creative finding their identity, voice and style decades before Barry Jenkins’ (rather more downbeat) Moonlight. The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off – sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear – born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater – after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s. There the former front-person of Silver Lake post-punk-combo Glue reinvented themselves as a cabaret performer and collaborated with famed art-collective Gelitin before passing away aged just 52. “SeanDe” entrusted their treasure-trove audiovisual archive to Zizenbacher, who with co-editor Sebastian Schreiner has crafted an eclectic collage generously spiced with effervescent extracts from DeLear’s own extensive video-diaries. These jagged hand-held snapshots bring back to often-hilarious life the electric days (and especially nights) from a quarter of a century ago, placed in retrospective context by present-day testimony from the survivors who knew SeanDe best and loved them the most. Sean DeLear – as in “chandelier” – lit up their world; Markus Zizenbacher now illuminates Sean DeLear for ours.