This low-fi feature debut from New York filmmaker Owen Kline, a protégé of the Safdie brothers who looks to have a direct line to the scruffy, jittery spirit of early ’70s filmmaking, is built around the picaresque rite of passage of a teenage cartoonist. A24’s film, which premiered at Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight area, occasionally seems like one of its protagonist’s work-in-progress comic strips. Even yet, it is unpredictable and bitterly poignant, like the quirky outcasts with whom he socialises, making every laugh (of which there are many) have a tinge of tragic misery to it.
When Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) is 17, he idolises the underground comics of Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar as well as the snug, cosy suburbia in which he was nurtured. He despises the place where he was brought up. After being encouraged to “always subvert” expectations by his art teacher, Mr Katano (Pulitzer-winning playwright Stephen Adly Gurgis), the young man drops out of school and heads for Trenton, New Jersey. He believes that the life of a creative requires one of poverty, deprivation and abject discomfort.
Barry (Michael Townsend Wright), the portly shut-in he leases a sofa from, is a hideous invention that could have come from the doodles of one of his creative heroes. It doesn’t take long for Robert (played by Marcia Debonis) to meet another oddball in the form of volatile loner Wallace (played by Matthew Maher).
Wallace (a troubled soul whose previous job was that of a comic book colour separator) quickly convinces Robert (played by Matthew Maher) that he is ideal mentor material. Cheryl tells her new intern, “You are genuinely delectable,” and it’s hard not to agree with her assessment of Kline’s delightfully odd comedy. “Regressive” coming-of-age narrative has a haphazard, spontaneous vibe to it, while the grainy, Super 16mm photography has a tactile, handcrafted sense to it.
There is a lot of contentious feistiness in the interaction between its mismatched main characters, which Kline has mentioned as an influence on the film. It’s a shame that the film ends abruptly after such a long and entertaining farcical set-piece (a riotous family Christmas in Princeton with Wallace dressed as the Grinch), but at least we get the impression that Wallace’s Grinch, like Nathan Zuckerman, Rabbit, and Antoine Doinel in Philip Roth and John Updike and Truffaut, has more than one chapter in him.