SOUND UNSEEN FF REVIEW: Adam Rehmeier’s DINNER IN AMERICA is a throwback punk-rock romance where weird is good
In a good way, Adam Rehmeier’s Dinner in America, which recently screened as part of the Sound Unseen Film + Music Festival, recalls the late ’90s indie film boom, when Quentin Tarantino released films in arthouses, Kevin Smith appealed to viewers beyond his fanbase, and a new Todd Solondz movie was a event. Its characters still write letters and take Polaroids without any level of nostalgia or irony involved, and the more dysfunctional a character is, the more you’re meant to feel weirdly sympathetic to them even if you’d cross the street to avoid them in real life. It’s a world where real, unfiltered punk rock has legitimate shot of topping the charts, and singing in a Kim Deal or Tanya Donnelly style over fuzzy guitars is the quickest way to a straight boy’s heart.
In a bad way, it recalls your worst family holiday dinners. Though the central story is of an unlikely romance between an overmedicated suburban 20-year-old who may be on the spectrum, and a drug dealing-and-abusing indie punk front man with an arson habit, the movie is bookended with four dysfunctional dinner sequences that show us that while awkward family traditions never change, protagonists do. And, perhaps, that those of us who relate can change the way we react to the situation.
Simon (Kyle Gallner) leaves rehab prematurely with a partial refund and withdrawal shakes. Invited home by a fellow early release who makes clear her intentions to blow him, he soon runs afoul of her family, and sets their house on fire, as one does. Hiding from the police, he befriends Patty (Emily Skeggs) a mousy, awkward pet store employee whose desire to be liked he expertly manipulates in order to hide out at her house. But just to show he’s not altogether a bad guy, he offers to do her any favor of her choice in exchange for helping him escape. And she wants him to take her to see her favorite band, Psy Ops.
This presents a complication, because Simon is actually the mask-wearing Psy Ops front man known as John Q. Patty doesn’t know this, but when she reveals she’s been sending love letters and sexy Polaroids to John Q, it makes everything more awkward. Meanwhile, the rest of Psy Ops are trying to move on without the front man they believe is still institutionalized.
Being a know-it-all punk front man, Simon is one of those young guys who believes himself a bold teller of hard truths, which makes him about fifty percent useful corrective to superficial fools, and another fifty percent pure asshole. But since most of his insults go over Patty’s head, she doesn’t get hostile in response, which confounds the young man who’s used to fighting everything and everyone. He grows protective of her, and at one point assists her in a revenge prank that is laugh-out-loud awesome. Trigger warning: it does involve a dead cat, but one that was already dead before the movie started.
Where the friendship turns to romance becomes a potential minefield. On one level, yes, this has all the problems of a Beauty and the Beast dynamic, with an innocent, sheltered girl falling for – and changing — a “bad boy” who’s angry, self-destructive, and massively resents any limits placed on his behavior. What makes it more palatable here is, firstly, the movie is realistic that its characters are in no way role models, and secondly, once she’s given some space, Patty becomes as much the aggressor/initiator in her own way as Simon. Most straight guys have at some point encountered the stalkery girl type who could be attractive but is just too weird for comfort – Skeggs’ performance, however, lets Patty become attractive without ever negating her weirdness or stalker tendencies. Realistically, we might imagine that this couple could wind up like the infamous zinesters and alleged spousal abusers Jim and Debbie Goad if they stay together later in life, but this is the movies and they can be forever young onscreen. It’s not like, say, American Beauty where you’re asked to take it all as super-profound. Their pairing, a bit like the movie itself, is punk – it’s gleefully messy, passionate, loudly played, and might end more quickly than we want it to.
Like the classic indie films it emulates, Dinner in America cannily scores fun cameos in bit parts. Lea Thompson shows up as a horny wine mom, and doesn’t even need to evoke her most famous character to sell the gag. Pat Healy and Mary Lynn Rajskub are perfection as Patty’s parents – Skeggs looks like she could really be their genetic daughter. And the soundtrack kicks – Canadian punk band Disco Assault provide Psy Ops’ tunes, while Rehmeier and Emily Skeggs co-wrote a climactic tune that’s easily the best original song written and performed for a movie this year (and maybe last as well). It’s meant to win over our hearts as it does Simon’s, and in my case at least, mission accomplished.
You’d probably be annoyed by Simon and Patty in real life. They’d definitely be bad dinner guests. But in all likelihood, you’ll emerge from the movie loving one or both.
