THE LIFE OF SEAN DELEAR is orientated along the life of its protagonist´s posthumous estate. It starts with the story of a black boy finding his sexual identity in Simi Valley. He escapes `over the hill´ to Los Angeles to start a new life. The dream of becoming an artist nourishes his mind. Soon he gets to the thick of the vivid underground culture of LA´s and New
York´s 80s, becomes friends with the Club 57 members John Sex, Ann Magnuson and Keith Haring, rushing through the 80s like a thunderstorm. By the 90s he is front singer of the post-punk band GLUE and has fully transformed to his persona Sean DeLear, leaving his dead name Tony Robertson once and for all behind.

He starts living with actress and femme fatal Susan Tyrrell and rocks the Silver Lake scene together with other bands like Possum Dixon, Extra Fancy, Hole, L7, The Geraldine Fibbers et al. The band can’t get on the Grunge wave of the 90s. After a demo recording for Reprise Records, they don’t really produce new songs. Too much party and not enough energy to get the studio album together, the band slowly dissolves by the 2000s. Sean starts working as a Go-go-dancer and nightlife photographer for a free gay magazine, basically accepting any job he can get.

But this doesn’t last forever. He meets the Austrian performance group GELITIN in the late nineties where he finds a new artistic family to act out his creative mind. Europe and its art scene embrace him. He does readings in Berlin, joins a noiseband in Vienna (TRUMATIC) where he decides to move to in 2015.

As he starts acting in theatre and film projects in Munich and Vienna, new aspects of his talent appear from scratch. Producers and theater makers get attracted by his countenance. With 50 he is ready to become a main stream star. In a performance at Residenz-Theater Munich, he´s put on stage in a golden glitter costume to sing and perform as he always did. A month after the last show, he passes.

In 2021 KID CONGO POWER and THE MONKEY BIRDS release the record SWING FROM THE SEAN DELEAR, in 2023 his teenage diaries from 1979 get published by Semiotext(e) and become broadly recognised. A year later THE LIFE OF SEAN DELEAR has its premiere.

-- Dir. Markus Zizenbacher - 82min - 2024 - Austria --

"loving film about queer black punk rocker, and secret legend" - Guardian

"A multidisciplinary artist and scene queen in a variety of different circles from the beautiful elite to the queer punks of LA in the 90s, Sean DeLear broke the mould when it came to being Black and gay in the art world and in the music scene. A rebel in the face of gender, race, and sexuality, DeLear fronted the post-punk band Glue, whose music video was deemed too hot for MTV, and counted The B-52s and Yoko Ono among his fans." - Frameline Festival

"The raw VHS aesthetic fits perfectly with this self-performing life beyond all norms, just as the film itself is a declaration of love for the handmade, do-it-yourself aesthetic of bygone subcultures, which don't care about high resolution or high gloss." - Diagonale, Vienna

"a sparkling, lively, cheerful, ironic and self-ironic documentary. A true hymn to life" - Cinema Austriaco

"a vivacious and colourful look at the crushingly charismatic Sean DeLear and his experiences in the LA punk scene of the 80s and 90s." - Hyper Real Film Club

"a fun and enlightening tribute, honouring the counterculture spirit of this American artist....Did SeanD really go to high school with Courtney Love? Did he really befriend Kate Moss after crashing her birthday party? The film dispels none of the myths about this artist of allure and mystery." - The Brattle