Dinner in America review – quirky couple take a trip through suburbia
“Is weird cool?” “In your case, no.” This pert exchange summarises the style of writer-director Adam Rehmeier’s indie dramedy, with two very good lead performers whose unexpected chemistry gradually makes this film likable. It’s about an angry punk singer with a pyromania fetish and a lonely and nerdy young woman with ADHD who is his biggest fan.
Kyle Gallner plays John Q Public (real name: Simon), the lead singer of a band called Psy Ops who performs anonymously in a balaclava; offstage, he has a vocal-fry badass voice, like Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Simon is experiencing furious musical differences with the rest of the band and is making money through selling weed and taking part in big pharma medical experiments. Emily Skeggs is excellent as quirky, dreamy Patty, who takes indistinct Polaroids of herself masturbating to his music in her childhood bedroom and sends them to him via the mailbox address on the band’s flyers.
But, when Simon gets into trouble after setting something on fire, Patty shields him from the police, never dreaming that he is the object of her self-pleasuring fan correspondence; meanwhile, he has no idea that this irritating dork has been sending him the (rather gratifying) photos. Soon the pair are getting into criminal scrapes together, like a low-rent Bonnie and Clyde who never actually travel anywhere.
Simon’s most famous song, evidently, is something called Dinner in America, and this film proceeds in a series of three desperately uncomfortable middle-class family dinners with three different families, Simon being a smouldering guest at each. The “dinner table scene with sulky kids” scene is a staple of US indie movies satirising suburban ennui, and this could have been a cliche. But Rehmeier creates something amusing and offbeat in each one, and Pat Healy and Mary Lynn Rajskub are entertaining as Patty’s uptight parents.
Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Todd Solondz’s Happiness were at opposite ends of the spectrum of difficult weirdness for this kind of material, Solondz setting a gold standard for strangeness, dysfunction and discomfort. Rehmeier is at the American Beauty end of things. His film has its own truculent charm.
• Dinner in America is released on digital platforms on 1 June.