Right impulse goes all wrong
“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” — the title has next to nothing to do with the movie — is an example of a good impulse tied to a bad idea.
Writer-director John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) had a good impulse, of wanting to re-create the atmosphere of the harsh London suburbs just as punk was cresting in 1977 — the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s 25th anniversary jubilee. There’s a tendency to remember everything in the past as more harmless than it was, for the simple reason that we now know that the world didn’t end. But in its time, punk was alarming, and the re-creations of punk performances that Mitchell offers here capture that apocalyptic feeling they engendered.
Still, in narrative art, every impulse needs a story, and that’s when the bad idea — the very bad idea — comes in. Young Enn (a likable Alex Sharp) and his mates talk their way into a party in Croydon, where they encounter many strange people dressed in skintight pastel clothing, doing odd dances and making the occasional screeching noise, a screeching that seems unworldly. And, guess what? It is unworldly. These are colonists from another planet, who would have preferred to study London, but the queen’s jubilee has pushed them all to Croydon. Too many crowds and all.
Among the aliens is Zan (Elle Fanning), who is sick of being a space tourist and wants to have a more direct experience of earthling existence. After a conversation with Enn, who knows she’s not of his world and so he assumes she’s from the United States, she decides she wants to know all about punk.
So what we have here is punk nostalgia crossed with an intergalactic romance. And maybe that sounds interesting or at least original — oh, to be a fly on the wall for that pitch meeting — but in actual practice, it falls pretty flat, landing in a nothing zone between John Waters-style satire and a sincere love story. Mitchell doesn’t commit to the ridiculousness of the premise, so there’s no release in comedy, and yet he seems to want credit for being absurdist, so the love story has no impact.
Really, there is only a single good scene, and that happens to be the one in which the punk and the space alien elements combine most directly. Zan, with the musical backing of Enn and his friends, performs a punk song about the reproductive process on her planet. (The old eat the young.) She starts quietly and builds into a raving, screaming exercise in true British-style punk, complete with a sarcastic reference to the staid past: “And in the end the love you take / Is equal to the ones you eat!”
But that’s it. There are just two good minutes there, and another two or three more when Nicole Kidman, as a rock promoter, takes a record executive to hear her latest discovery, but the band turns out to be too punk to survive. That’s five good minutes — five minutes that seem like John Cameron Mitchell at his “Hedwig” best — and the rest is dull, uninvolving slog.