We'd only be guessing, since the film wanders all over the place......sometimes it's a studious replica of all the downbeat, rebel-without-a-clue dramas that clogged video store shelves in the 80's and 90's.........(we suppose that's why the film's titles evoke a creased, defective VHS tape...)
And sometimes (and BQ visitors know how much we hate this)......it erupts into all that "look at me! look at me!" stylistic crap designed to impress the hell out of film festival attendees.....
Never settling on what it wants to be and what story it's telling, the film presents us with a lonely alienated teen (flavor-the-month Timothee Chalamet), exiled to Cape Cod for the summer of 1991.
Chalamet quickly forms an uneasy, unlikely friendship-alliance with the town's legendary Bad Boy Delinquent pot dealer (Alex Roe)......also the estranged brother of the town's legendary Bad Girl Hottie (Maika Monroe).......risking the wrath of the still fiercely protective Roe, Chalamet pursues a forbidden romance with Monroe......
Director Bynum never decides whose story this is.......the movie randomly bounces around from sweet, coming-of-age romance to thuggish bad-assery......and back again. Ultimately it ends up as nobody's movie and you wonder why you wasted an hour and 47 minutes on it.
(And memo to Bynum.......all your little film festival whim-whams, so beloved by the indie film culture-vultures, leave us massively unimpressed.........if you cut to a shot of a 7 year old girl saying, "He fucking killed someone...", it doesn't make you Steve Soderbergh.....)
1 star (*) and none of that star goes to the blank, boring Chalamet, the overly smoldering Roe and the dead-eyed, vacant Monroe.......the single star gets divided up between Emory Cohen and Willliam Fichtner for their short but memorable scenes at the drug bosses you never want to mess with.......
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