It features an ensemble cast of international actors, including Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant, Werner Herzog, James Fox, Anita Pallenberg and Leos Carax.

The film follows a Michael Jackson look-alike joining a commune filled with other impersonators as they build a stage to attract people to see them perform.

Haunted by her angelic beauty, he follows her to a commune in the Scottish Highlands, joining her husband Charlie Chaplin, and her daughter Shirley Temple.

The website's consensus reads: "Less biting or offensive than Korine's earlier works, this frustratingly dull film still maintains the director's trademark odd beauty.

Scott of The New York Times praised Luna and Morton for performing "without cuteness or camp" in their roles and Korine's "richly colored, wide-frame compositions" throughout the film but gave note that the incoherent story will cause viewers to find his filmmaking style "frustratingly hermetic" and "morbidly preoccupied" with "expressive [power of] pictures than [in] conventional psychology."

He concluded: "And yet "Mister Lonely," self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm.

"[12] Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle called the movie "Korine's most accessible as a director", noting that it featured "stirring and unforgettable" characters and imagery that "go[es] from poignant to comic and back again" when following the impersonators and the nuns, concluding that: "What does it all mean?

"[13] Paste contributor Alissa Wilkinson wrote: "Well-acted and at times funny, the imaginative premise dances around a great potential for profundity.

"[14] Jeremiah Kipp of Slant Magazine was initially positive during the film's "vaudevillian" opening for maintaining the "free-form narrative style" of Korine's previous efforts, but felt the Scottish Isle scenes came across like a continuous "parade of skits".

"[15] Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times commended Luna and Morton for being "enormously likable and engrossing" in their roles and the nuns' tale for having a "straightforward, realistic quality" to it, but felt the rest of the film lacked "emotional involvement" and "sustained attention" during the commune scenes, concluding that "while it's full of arresting, indelible images, "Mr. Lonely" remains mostly on the level of abstraction.

"[16] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that: "Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely" is an odd, desperate film, lost in its own audacity, and yet there are passages of surreal beauty and preposterous invention that I have to admire.

The film doesn't work, and indeed seems to have no clear idea of what its job is, and yet (sigh) there is the temptation to forgive its trespasses simply because it is utterly, if pointlessly, original.