Stoner girls cope with life’s twists in ‘Never Goin’ Back’
Are you ready for the Texas-set indie film version of “Two Broke Girls”?
Writer-director Augustine Frizzell’s semi-autobiographical romp “Never Goin’ Back,” which will also remind some of Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” tells the coming-of-age story of high school dropouts Jessie (Camila Morrone, “Death Wish”) and Angela (Aussie Maia Mitchell), two wild and crazy young women who are in love and share a bed in a small house rented by Jessie’s brother Dustin (Joel Allen).
Angela and Jessie wait tables at a pancake restaurant, where the older father-figure manager Roderick (an amusing Marcus M. Mauldin) has shown tremendous patience enduring their ineptitude and multiple absences. Just as Angela has spent the girls’ rent money on a trip to the beach at Galveston to celebrate Jessie’s 18th birthday (“We deserve this,” Angela says), Dustin and his pals, fast-talking Tony (Kendal Smith) and spoiled Ryan (Matthew Holcomb), pool their money to buy a pound of weed.
Unfortunately, Dustin, who rents space on the sofa to randy fast-food worker Brandon (Kyle Mooney of “Saturday Night Live,” doing the same creepy stoner character he does on the show), gets robbed outside the dealer’s house, and now Dustin doesn’t have the rent money, either. Later, stoners Jessie and Angela get arrested for drug possession after Tony breaks into the house to try to get his money back.
What are a bunch of losers going to do?
Half the time, “Never Goin’ Back” plays like a stupidity contest, and you sit there thinking, OK, everything these idiots do is going to go wrong. But I’m supposed to fall in love with them anyway because they remind me of me when I was their age.
But they don’t. They remind me of idiots I stayed away from when I was their age.
A sequence in which the young ladies get stoned and must show up at work totally baked has its moments. The film’s climax aims to gross you out and succeeds. Like many films of this type, “Never Goin’ Back” reminds me of a fictionalized version of already fictionalized “reality” TV shows.
Newcomers Mitchell and Morrone, however, are likable screen presences in spite of the familiarity of the milieu and action.