Anything but a simple road trip
Adolescent boy conjures Andy Warhol to figure out life in film set in 1976 Nova Scotia
I remember running into a fellow critic at the Toronto International Film Festival last September after screening Bruce McDonald’s Weirdos. “It’s like an ad for a K-Tel bestof-the-’70s collection,” he gasped. I was relieved: It wasn’t just me who thought that.
There’s more to it than that, of course, but Weirdos is set over the U.S. bicentennial July 4 weekend of 1976, with a K-Tel meets CanCon soundtrack to match: vintage Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot; Patsy Gallant singing From New York to L.A.; Crowbar’s Oh, What a Feeling; Murray McLauchlan with Down by the Henry Moore. (Singin’ don’t you want to keep on moving ...).
Kit, aged 15 and played by the cherubic Dylan Authors, wants to leave his hometown of Antigonish, and keep on moving until he gets to Sydney. (Granted, that’s only about 200 kilometres, but this is a small movie.) He tells his dad and grandmother he’s spending the night at his friend Alice’s house. Meanwhile, Alice (Julia Sarah Stone) has told her mom the same lie, giving them a head start on their hitchhiking adventure.
It’s a simple goal — there’s a party on the beach at their destination, and Kit also plans to see his mom (Molly Parker). But things are complicated by Kit’s relationship to Alice: She keeps pestering him for sex, and he keeps putting it off. And if his sexual ambiguity weren’t clear enough, he is occasionally visited by Andy Warhol, who introduces himself as Kit’s spirit animal and says interesting but maddeningly vague things about life.
Rhys Bevan-John doesn’t look much like Warhol — if anything, the nearest resemblance is to Bill Hader playing Warhol — but that’s not really the point. Kit is trying to figure himself out, and his spirit animal is helping him process things. “We’re all a little Andy Warhol,” he tells Kit at one point.
Weirdos was written by Daniel MacIvor, the Sydney-born playwright who also wrote McDonald’s 2010 film Trigger. After the director’s weird colour experiments on his last film, the Halloween horror Hellions, he has chosen to shoot this one in a soft black and white, and to keep the narrative as straightforward as the winding roads of Nova Scotia will allow. Kit may define himself as a weirdo, but this nostalgic, simple road trip is anything but.