The Wackness

What a refreshing surprise!  In short, it’s a coming-of-age movie dealing with first loves, last summers before college, and trouble at home.  But that’s merely the plot that takes us from place to place.

It was a surreal, bittersweet dreamscape movie similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  The cinematography really sells the random uncertainty of what we see in our dreams.  Not very often do you see things clearly.  Rooms are shrouded in darkness, silhouettes barely lit by their edges by a single light way off in the distance.  A shallow focus blurs out everything in the periphery, and extreme close-ups swallow you in the raw essence of the here and now.  Sometimes the camera bobs and rolls, the action sped up or slowed down, and individual sounds or random background elements aggressively take the fore.  A lot of what you see is just shapes and colors, all of it open to interpretation.  Time jumps happen making you uncertain of where you are and how you got to this point.

Taking place inside this audio/visual framework is an unlikely bro-mance between a drugged out, old shrink Jeff (or “Mr. Dr. Squires”) and his young patient/dealer Luke.  They’re unlikely best friends, offering each other advice good and bad and serving as each other’s emotional rock during their individual and shared experiences getting into trouble.  Their maturity sometimes switches places, both having a chance to be the “big brother”/”father figure.”

The soundtrack is mostly good old ’90s hip-hop from long before it turned from rap-to-crap and drowned the Top 40 airwaves and nightclubs.  The lead character is a drug-dealing white teen, but his music influences the way he speaks.  He’s not a gangsta, but he talks like a thug.  It’s often comic when he (and eventually his older friend) slip into manners of speech that seem less than fitting with the otherwise “normal white guy” way they look.  One especially funny moment is when Luke is rehearsing how he’ll tell a girl “I love you” in the mirror several ways before thugging it up and casually calling her his shorty.

Acting is 100% stellar all around and everyone really owns and lives their character.

Highly recommended.