I don't know how to review this movie without mentioning spoilers in it, to be quite honest. Most of the plot is standing on twists, which makes it impossible to offer a review without revealing them. Still, I feel like the movie is worth an opinion, even if I'm super late to provide it.

I haven't read Shige's books but, before seeing this movie, I saw Kasa wo Motanai Aritachi wa, for which I also left a review and, for that, I did read a detailed summary. I was in the dark with this one, didn't know more than what the description says, but for my experience with Shige's storytelling, it's very much his thing.

The movie has a twist in the middle of it, which makes you have to re-trace your steps and go back to the start. I appreciated that and, to be honest, I feel like that was the best thing in the whole movie. It's expected of a Shige story but unexpected for a movie like this one, and I don't think I've seen that tool used before in such a way.

I feel like there are a lot of missed opportunities in the second half of the movie, though. It was implied, through this half, that the real Gocchan wasn't like the one Dai had written in his book and performed in the first half. We found out some bits and pieces of his life as an idol, which were far from what Dai had idealized, and I wish that was the core of this part.

I wanted that discovery to be the center of the change, because it's what was shown to us throughout. We saw a very far-removed Gocchan, very private and stoic, very unreachable. This was Dai's idealized version, the one he wrote, the one he wanted to peform, and if the second half would have been a road towards unraveling this mystery and finding what Gocchan was actually feeling in this entretainment medium, if we could see what led him to taking his own life, uncovering the life Dai had always craved for and seeing it for real...that would have made sense.

Instead, the reason is pulled out of nowhere. It's given to this realtionship with a sister who showed up all but 2 minutes, something that makes no sense in the plot and I feel is just there for shock value. That "reveal" to me was not only underwhelming and a bit offputting, it was also in detriment to what the story had been building up to then. There are references to the sister here and there, the song he writes and the way he dies, but that's not enough to justify how much the movie's story was leaning elsewhere.

The second half is filled with these shock values, some of which are, I guess, understandable to showcase the raw nature of showbiz, but even though they add those things, they don't speak about showbiz in the way I feel the movie could have, given the story up to that point. I understand that Shige can't completely throw under the bus the industry that's giving him work but, at the same time, I wish the movie could have made something that made more storytelling sense and fit the theme it was carrying up to that point.

It's an interesting movie, a movie with very good storytelling devices and directorial decisions that make it stand out from the rest. Still, the simplification of its 2nd half made it a bit of a dissappointment to me, not enough to regret watching it but enough to wonder how a better outcome could have been.