It is no news that in our age it is rather cheap and easy to be self-obsessed: we broadcast the daily minutiae on Twitter, show the flitered snaps of our coffees, travels and faces on Instagram, and dump blogs on arts, politics and travel on unsuspecting audiences. Although it is probably since times immemorial that people searched for their identities and meaning by scoruing through memories, filtering their experiences and expecting others to validate what they found, it is the new media and recent loosening of communal restraint (and support) that now allow us to bring this tumulut from our heads and share it to the wider uncaring world. If you are a sort of person living in a society where community matters relatively little, spending more time sharing your day to day than actually experiencing it, you probably know that sinking feeling of shouting into the void and feling miserable when the void does not answer back.

This recent phenomenon of whoelsale attention seeking does not get nearly enough, well, attention and “Welcome to me” would have been a masterpiece of the genre had it made its heroine, a severely bipolar, barely funcioning lottery multi-millionaireness, a little more ordinary: say a big-city acountant keen on social networks. Even though a masterpeice it ain’t, this underappreciated 2015 indie with sizeable names (Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, and Tim Robbins to name a few) brings more than enough black comedy and thoughtfulness due to its intriguing premise: what would you do if you could make a talk-show about yourself and would all this attention make all the pain of your alienated self go away? Wiig is amazing in portraying a severelly ill woman who believes that all it would take for her to get better is a lot of self-confidence and fair share of lime-light (you could see her getting on well with Jake Gyllenhall’s character from the Nightcrawler). Her show about herself is produced and expolited by an eager local TV station on the ropes, while the people who presumably care the most about her (shrink, family, friends) slowly get scared off by the dazzle of her new-found confdence and production. Althought it all ends rather predictably and the film is at its weakest when it jumps into surreal, “Welcome to me” is a great antidote to typical underdog healing stories in which all you need is to sing your own song and sing it loudly, by suggesting that maybe a better way is to at least try and harmonise with your band…