Jan Borysewicz asked for one thing from the film about his life: that it make nothing look better than it was. He did not want to hide the successes, the mistakes or the price of a life he describes as subordinated to music. Less of a Stranger, Netflix’s Polish rock biopic about the guitarist who founded Lady Pank, is built from his memories on those terms, and his songs carry it.

The film, titled Mniej obcy in Polish, is a scripted drama, not a documentary. Director and producer Kristoffer Rus follows a restless guitarist from a boy’s fixation with the instrument in Wrocław to the top of the Polish rock scene in the last years of communism, and then through what Netflix’s synopsis lists as the bill: family tragedies, personal collapses, clashes with the authorities and a long balancing act between talent and self-destruction. Mikołaj Bukrewicz, a guitarist who had never carried a feature film, plays the adult Borysewicz, and Mirosław Tomczuk plays him as a boy. Wiktor Piątkowski and Joanna Kozłowska wrote the screenplay, and Paprika Studios produced.

The band is cast around him. Marcel Barra plays singer Janusz Panasewicz, Hubert Miłkowski plays bassist Paweł Mścisławski, Krzysztof Oleksyn plays guitarist Edmund Stasiak and Mikołaj Matczak plays drummer Jarosław Szlagowski. Patryk Pietrzak takes the role of Andrzej Mogielnicki, the lyricist who co-founded Lady Pank with Borysewicz and wrote most of the words a generation of Polish radio listeners learned by heart. Kinga Preis and Ireneusz Czop play Jan’s mother and father, with Maciej Musiałowski and Konrad Kąkol also in the cast.

For viewers outside Poland, the scale of the band is the context that matters. Borysewicz and Mogielnicki had just walked out of Budka Suflera, one of the country’s best-known rock groups, when a song called ‘Mała Lady Punk’, recorded during a session for singer Izabela Trojanowska, took off on the radio and pushed Borysewicz to build a band around it. The spelling became ‘Pank’ so that nobody would file them with the punks. Panasewicz, brought in by Mogielnicki, took over the vocals once his military service was done. Their debut album sent six songs to number one on Polish Radio Three’s chart, ‘Kryzysowa narzeczona’ and ‘Mniej niż zero’ among them, and in their busiest year the band played somewhere between two and four hundred concerts.

The title has its own history. Mniej obcy, literally ‘less of a stranger’, is also the name of the authorized biography Borysewicz published as a long conversation with television host Marcin Prokop, a book that went into parts of his life he had kept quiet for decades. It also reads as a reply to one of those early chart-toppers, ‘Wciąż bardziej obcy’, roughly ‘ever more of a stranger’. A band that once sang about drifting away now puts its founder’s name on a promise to close the distance.

Borysewicz set out the terms himself in Netflix Poland’s announcement. “This is not a story about how it is worth blindly chasing your dreams,” he said. “It is more that if you really cannot give something up, you have to be ready to bear the consequences of your choices.” He added that he hopes viewers will see an honest account of a passion that can give freedom but can also take a great deal away. Rus calls the film more than a classic music biography: the story of a man who fulfils his biggest dream and soon learns how high the price can be, set in a country where rock ’n’ roll was, in his words, “freedom, rebellion and a chance to live by your own rules”.

That setting is the second thread running through the project. Lady Pank’s first records came out during martial law and the years right after it, when state radio, state labels and state concert agencies decided who reached an audience. Festival reporters in Gdynia counted three competition films this year in which the declaration of martial law appears on screen, and Less of a Stranger was one of them. Netflix’s synopsis puts conflict with the authorities on the list of what success cost Borysewicz, next to the damage done at home.

The casting of the lead follows the same instinct as the brief Borysewicz gave. Bukrewicz plays guitar for a living, and Polish critics who saw the film in Gdynia noted that the instrument never looks like a prop in his hands. The film premiered there in the main competition of the Polish Film Festival, where Bukrewicz received the GQ Poland award for Film Visionary and the production won the prize for best visual effects, shared by supervisor Sebastian Dominik and the studio Lumiere de Cinema. The Golden Lions went to Maciej Sobieszczański’s Przez ścianę. Reactions were mixed: Interia’s critic called the Lady Pank music the strongest thing in it and found the voice-over narration too eager to explain what the images had already shown.

Poland has built a steady line of these films. Skazany na bluesa told the story of Dżem singer Ryszard Riedel, Jesteś Bogiem followed the hip-hop trio Paktofonika, and Ikar. Legenda Mietka Kosza traced a blind jazz pianist’s gift and his undoing. Lady Pank has even been on screen before, playing itself in Paweł Karpiński’s To tylko rock at the height of its fame. What changes with Less of a Stranger is the audience: as a Netflix release, most of the people pressing play outside Poland will hear these songs for the first time, without the memories Polish viewers bring to them.

That is the bet the film makes, and it is an unusual one for an authorized biopic. The subject has signed off on it and has also asked for the mistakes to stay in. Borysewicz still leads Lady Pank more than four decades on, and the band still plays the songs the film is built from. The story can show a young man choosing music over nearly everything else. It cannot tell him, or the family that paid part of that price, whether the trade was worth it.

Less of a Stranger: what to know

When and where does Less of a Stranger premiere? Less of a Stranger premieres on Netflix on 7 October 2026. It had its world premiere in the main competition of the 51st Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, held from 21 to 26 September 2026.

Is Less of a Stranger a true story? It is a scripted drama inspired by the life and memories of Jan Borysewicz, the guitarist and founder of Lady Pank. It is not a documentary.

Who plays Jan Borysewicz? Mikołaj Bukrewicz, a guitarist making his big-screen debut, plays the adult Borysewicz. Mirosław Tomczuk plays him as a boy.

Two young men embracing on a train platform in the Netflix film Less of a Stranger — Photo: Z. Woińska / Netflix

Does the film use Lady Pank’s music? Yes. Netflix says the band’s biggest hits feature in the film, Borysewicz is credited for the music, and Karim Martusewicz wrote the score.

What language is it in and how long is it? The film is in Polish, under the original title Mniej obcy, and runs about two hours.