Spielberg’s recent Fabelmans in which the young Steven character has a vision of himself filming a family argument. Here’s a boy who thinks with the camera, and who sees the world through cinema. It’ll make him a wunderkind. And it’ll make him use that skill to create joyously cinematic genre pictures that’ll, in part, interrogate family and how people make them and break them. It’s a whole career in an image—typical of the revealing nature of an auteur’s work, especially in a confident, relaxed Late Style. For Kevin Smith’s version we have The 4:30 Movie, in which the Smith stand-in is a dorky teenager in 1986 (Austin Zajur) who wants nothing more than to sneak into an R-rated movie for a first date with his crush (Siena Agudong). And so we get this: a pretty girl with a wide smile earnestly and affectionately telling a chubby nerd, “wow, you know a lot about movies and TV shows!” Smith, unlike Spielberg, has a pretty one-track mind—sex, weed, pop culture. That’s about it. The end credits of this movie include a long “Thanks” section that includes everything from Little Debbie and Little House on the Prairie to George Lucas and John Hughes. (It’s a succinct syllabus for Kevin Smith Studies.) His preoccupations made for a bit of Gen X freshness with his scrappy indie Clerks back in 1994, what with its minimum wage slackers chattering back and forth about movies or sex acts in amateur cheap-o black and white. But, aside from a few successful fluke attempts at developing a style and deepening his thematic concerns (apocalyptic Catholic fantasy comedy Dogma, sentimental single-father rom-com Jersey Girl, and grungy political horror Red State), Smith’s been stuck in a permanent adolescence ever since, both as a stylist—all flat coverage, bland lighting, and simple staging—and as a writer—all surface-level allusions and references. His previous picture, the dreary and sappy Clerks III, even indulges in recreations of scenes from the first, as its legacy sequel status has the characters in the movie making a movie about their lives, which is a kind of worse Clerks.
As Smith became a more repetitive niche interest, he dug in deeper into his chatty nerds’ limited imaginations. (Even a couple weirder horror adjacent pitches the past decade play like shaggy podcast anecdotes.) He’s making hangout movies for himself, and his die-hard fans, and his chummy collaborators, keeping his work cheap and lowering expectations. But he enjoys himself and that's what still causes his movies to have little sparkles of idiosyncratic interest. That his latest is comfortably his best in nearly 15 years is a tribute to its breezy smallness that makes his newfound sentiment comfortably quaint. It finds our lead and his buddies hanging out all day at a three-screen movie theater in their hometown while awaiting his crush. We see clips of fake trailers—decent—and some fake movies—pretty sloppy. (There are also tons of jokes in which characters straight-faced say something like “There’ll never be more Star Wars” or “Bill Cosby will always be admired” with dopey historical irony.) Along the way is some silly banter, some stupid antics, and a few funny performers (Justin Long, Rachel Dratch, Sam Richardson, Ken Jeong, Adam Pally, Jason Lee) doing their best with some thin characters. But nothing too outrageous happens, and the lines are never more than passably amusing, and the people are all broad shtick. It’s a genial enough thing, a pleasant, undemanding sit, and sure to please, or at least intrigue, the micro-generation of like-minded nerds for whom Smith remains a figure of note. But it’s ultimately so low-stakes and lacking in narrative and emotional—let alone comedic—juice that it mostly evaporates on contact with dead air between the projector and the audience. It’s a movie for people whose greatest dream is for a pretty girl to admire them merely for their movie knowledge. Hey, we can dream.
