Directed by Markus Zizenbacher, a blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles’ underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979.
If ever there was a person who lived life to the fullest, it was Sean DeLear. The Life of Sean DeLear’s eighty-two minutes only give us a relatively brief look into their life but it’s easy to see how hectic, colourful and fluid it was. Markus Zizenbacher does a wonderful job of doing justice to the vibrancy of DeLear but also the emotional issues in play. There’s some familiar ground for young queer people, the conflicts, the trauma, the money issues, the running away to find their chosen family. Though that doesn’t mean that this feels like a tale like any other, it is unique to DeLear, their story is their own.
One of the great choices that Zizenbacher is to be so open, frank and loose. The conversation is entirely honest and probably even uncomfortably so for some people. It casually flows through the different conversations of sex, gender, sexuality, drugs, family, relationships and more. It has a structure to the way that it moves through DeLear’s life, but it keeps a flexible feel. It excellently mixes the talking heads with the archive footage. Another great choice was to simply have the talking heads in their own environments, to make it feel like a genuine conversation in daily life rather than a serious sit-down.
The choice of narration was another brilliant inclusion, the voice is so wholesome and serene, to put it atop the chaotic life and diary entries of DeLear was a stark contrast which works beautifully. There’s also a certain amount of sadness to be found within The Life of Sean DeLear but it never overrides their character as a whole with their big energy and electricity. As it veers more into that territory, it perhaps isn’t as strong, but you can see Zizenbacher’s intention to give a rounded view of DeLear’s life rather than just hitting the highlights.
The Life of Sean DeLear is a fascinating exploration into the life of a truly vibrant and complicated soul. The rich life that Sean DeLear led, both the good and the bad, is captured very well by Markus Zizenbacher. There’s such a great flow and casual tone to it, it fluidly moves through different topics, throwing quite a lot at you but it never feels intense. It’s one of those stories that could easily pass you by, DeLear is a relatively niche personality, if an icon in their own right, but you’ll be glad to have learnt about them.
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