THE SWEET EAST
Free Ryder…
★★★★★ OUT 29 MARCH CINEMAS
Talia Ryder isn’t actually related to her namesake Winona. Yet there’s a lot of the Heathers star in the younger Ryder’s quizzical turn in The Sweet East, an episodic road movie-slashcoming-of-age drama about a bored teenager from South Carolina who goes wilfully AWOL during a hedonistic school trip to her nation’s grandiose capital.
Hooking up first with a band of dumpster-diving artivists, disaffected Lillian (Ryder) goes on to form an attachment with a Poe-obsessed white supremacist called Lawrence (Red Rocket’s Simon Rex) who gives her room and board in return for unspecified sexual favours. It’s not long, however, before he also is traded up for two indie filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri) who cast her in a wigs-and-corsets period piece they’re making with British hottie Ian (Jacob Elordi).
Further adventures ensue, each more surreal and outlandish than the last. Yet Lillian views it all with insouciant equanimity, her Gen Z cool resolutely unruffled even when she is confronted with sudden gunbased violence. Cinematographer-turned-director Sean Price Williams lensed 2017’s Good Time for the Safdie brothers, and he brings a similar, improvisatory scrappiness to his debut feature, shot on grainy 16mm. As fitfully enthralling as the film is, though, it doesn’t ultimately amount to much more than a rogues’ gallery of garrulous eccentrics, cancelling each other out.
THE VERDICT A hip young cast shines in a diverting if disposable jaunt up America’s eastern seaboard.