[yasr_overall_rating]
A boy comes of age during a summer he spends in Cape Cod.
Ah, nostalgia. Sugar-coated memories, glorified by age. Many a director has tried to capture that moment of childhood that resonates throughout a lifetime; a vital, pivotal instance or summer break or year that left an indelible, ever-lasting bittersweet mark. One of the more successful examples of such films is Carla Simón’s “Summer 1993,” a tragedy seen through a sunny prism of a child. Richard Linklater has outdone them all with the Oscar-winning “Boyhood,” which painstakingly, docu-style, follows a young boy as he reaches adolescence. There are many great examples, ranging from “400 Blows” to “Stand by Me” to “Kings of Summer.”
My suspicion is that director Elijah Bynum has seen most, if not all, of those films. I would even bet one of them is a favorite of his, judging by the palpable earnestness and energy with which he wrote and directed his debut feature, “Hot Summer Nights,” He also seems to be a fan of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, “Donnie Darko,” “Dawson’s Creek,” and Maika Monroe. All of these disparate elements and influences almost manage to gel in the film – emphasis on “almost” – which lurches from one scene to the next with such glee, it’s easy to forgive its missteps simply for the entertainment factor alone.
The basic tale, set in the early 1990s and weirdly narrated by a child, is simple: Daniel (Timothée Chalamet) is an outcast spending his summers in white-man heaven, a.k.a. Cape Cod. Apparently, all the rich white folks love to smoke pot, so of course, the innocent Daniel is soon corrupted by Hunter (a hunky Alex Roe), a local bad boy who makes a modest living selling dime bags. Their “business” grows rapidly, and next thing the two dudes know, they’re drowning in cash and moving up that drug ladder. Of course, the local cop, ultra-sleazy Sergeant Calhoun (Thomas Jane), is on to them, as is the increasingly threatening mobster, Dex (Emory Cohen), who provides them with the pot. There is also McKayla (Monroe), the Cape Cod hottie – and Hunter’s sister – with whom Daniel is madly in love. Their eventual relationship gets in the way of Daniel’s friendship with Hunter. The whole affair – spoiler alert! – begins to deteriorate.
“Hot Summer Nights” starts off as a darkly-comedic tale and then gets increasingly muddled by its sentimental love affair interludes and pseudo-Tarantino “badassery.” While most of the dialogue is natural, albeit slightly exaggerated, Dex, for instance, talks like he’s auditioning for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” There are many violent interludes mixed in with instances of humor. How ironic, that a film about nostalgia would be nostalgic about a filmmaker whose films are in themselves nostalgic amalgamations of films past.
There is even a sequence involving a cocaine dealer, Shep (a fantastically zoned-out cameo by William Fichtner) and a naked female piano player that so strongly resembles the Alfred Molina firecracker scene in “Boogie Nights” that, along with Thomas Jane’s presence, leaves P.T. Anderson’s influence on this feature undoubtable. All the extended, one-take party shots scored to music of the director’s childhood bring to mind Richard Kelly’s debut – Donnie, like Daniel, an alien in the midst of drones. But hey, if you gotta steal… sorry, borrow, might as well borrow from the best, right? So why, then, include the tepid firefly sequence, where Daniel and McKayla enjoy a prolonged and soap opera-ish moment by a glimmering lake? Why extend the predictable ending to the nth degree?
Hot on the heels of his Oscar-nominated turn in “Call Me by Your Name,” Timothée Chalamet certainly shows a more extroverted, daring side of himself, his character prone to hilarious outbursts of spontaneity. Perhaps the strangest performance comes from Thomas Jane, who seems like he’s auditioning for an entirely different movie. Maika Monroe, with whom Bynum is in love, stands up to the challenge… and delivers a perfectly suitable performance. Considering how many loving close-ups there are of McKayla, the actress had her work cut out for her.
All in all, “Hot Summer Nights” contains the most important ingredient any film has to have: it’s entertaining, at least until its last twenty minutes. That said, original it’s not. It neatly ticks all the boxes of the current trends – which are frankly starting to run their course – such as throwbacks to a bygone era (see all things “Stranger Things”). With so many straws grasped at, this may be a summer you enjoy but will not want to revisit.
Available on DVD September 25th
