By Saffron Maeve 

You’ve already met Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), the tenacious Kubrick-truther with zero EQ and lofty dreams of the Tisch School Of The Arts. He’s no far cry from the goading basement dwellers colloquially termed “film bros,” a brand of arrested young men who love movies to the point of exhaustion; the sort who might hilariously respond to the mention of a house party with “I want to go home and watch The Manchurian Candidate (1962).” Set in early aughts Burlington, Chandler Levack’s affectionate, referential debut doesn’t quite sing their praises, instead ping-ponging between reproof and fondness for Lawrence’s debilitating cinephilia. It chips away at his thin spackle of narcissism and postured intelligentsia to reveal a yawning wound underneath. 

Hoping to amass $90,000 USD (NYU’s tuition per annum) in a matter of months, Lawrence gets a part-time job at his local video store, where he fawns over copies of Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998) and his thirty-something manager, Alana (Romina D’Ugo). The gig (and the crush) chucks a wrench into Lawrence’s weekly SNL watch party with fellow high-school reject Matt (Percy Hynes White), and exhausts his single mother (Krista Bridges), who chauffeurs him to and from work. Fittingly, the film features a literal and figurative hat tip to Punch-Drunk Love (2002), with Barry Egan’s brattiness refracted through Lawrence’s tantrums. Lehtinen isn’t Sandleresque, but is a natural—he softens Lawrence’s smugness with snivels and sighs, instantiating the kind of put-on masculinity that he both spurns and craves, granting Levack’s microbudget debut a necessary sliver of authenticity.

Saffron Maeve