Haley's On It: HEARTS BEAT LOUD, ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES, and ALL TOGETHER NOW

Brett Haley films are nice. Not naive. Not simplistic. But kind and gentle in ways that demonstrate maturity and perspective. He’s a fine director of actors. He gets warm, humane performances that are generous, honest, and flushed with the charm of well-observed moments. Lately he’s had sitcom stars — Nick Offerman, Justina Machado, Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Armisen — and rising young thespians — Kiersey Clemons, Sasha Lane, Elle Fanning, Auli’i Cravalho — in the most tender, quiet, open-hearted, dewey-eyed star turns. They’re given the space to do the kind of deeply, casually felt character work in which these familiar faces don’t disappear into their roles, but inhabit them, drawing out a life by playing it uncomplicatedly and imbuing it with inner light. If these films—sweet YA adaptations, or just leaning into the tropes for structure’s sake—drift slightly into formula on the plot level, there’s something too honest about the performances to ring false. Like the acoustic indie pop all over the soundtracks, these films breathe with a feeling of comforting style, while textured enough to tease out rougher edges. These are the movies the post-Fault in their Stars teen dramas wanted to be, but so rarely were.

I first discovered his work with 2018’s Hearts Beat Loud, a story of a single father (Offerman) and his teenage daughter (Clemons) who bond over making music during her last summer before college. It sings with its simply dramatized scenes of characters’ connections, a give and take dynamic that’s pure and earnest, and builds with all the prickliness of these specific people. It builds to a moment of ecstatic musical release, and then a well-earned quiet, resigned, wistful denouement. The songs by Keegan DeWitt are wonderful, not too good that they’re unbelievable, but good enough to buy them as earning a small-scale local buzz. And the movie is low-key inhabited by a wise sense of parental perspective, willing to get caught up in a new project, but all-too aware of the looming empty nest. It’s a movie about conversations, softly played and sensitively staged, as characters try to bolster relationships. There are criss-crossing subplots made up of the characters' ensemble of friends and connections (this supplies a bounty of character actors in supporting roles), but the focus is so keenly on the leads and this one liminal moment in a perfectly aimless summer. It builds into a lovely little portrait of a space and moment in these people’s lives—a sense carried over into Haley’s two straight-to-Netflix films of 2020.

First up was All the Bright Places, a serious-minded teen relationship picture that finds a suicidal girl (Fanning) and a bipolar boy (Justice Smith) drawn into a tentative romance. They meet on the edge. And maybe, just maybe, they can pull each other back. Without steering into the gloopy sentiment—which could easily have turned the tricky subject matter dangerous—the movie posits the teens’ connection as both a saving grace, and a suspenseful pause. Fanning, especially, sells the carefully hidden raw-nerve of an image-conscious teen’s struggle to hide her anguish. The whole school knows her older sister died last year. It’s weird when it’s acknowledged outright, but weird to ignore it, too. Her parents (Luke Wilson and Kelli O’Hara) are only so much help. They’re grieving, too, after all. Maybe a sympathetic ear is all she needs. Yet the boy, too, needs more psychological help than a teen romance can provide. The movie is surface soft, but willing to touch the true discomfort of real adolescent trauma. And it’s willing to admit, in ways the John Green copycats weren’t always able, that True Teenage Love is not a syrupy panacea for whatever ailment is crafted into a narrative hook. It instead invests in conversations between teens, parents, teachers, and different combinations thereof, finding unexpected emotional honesty far more appealing than loud cliche.

Even better in that regard is All Together Now, in which there’s no teen romance to speak of. Our lead (Cravalho) simply has no time for that. She’s a hard-working high schooler with her heart set on a college application. She holds down multiple jobs and barely has time to say hello to her mother (Machado) before falling asleep. They’re barely making ends meet, so she has to contribute to the household income. Or rather, the fund for a household, since they are currently experiencing homelessness. Her mother is, luckily, a part-time school bus driver, so they can sneak into her empty one and catch a few hours of sleep each night before her early-morning shifts. This sort of quiet desperation, in which the girl is forced to slap on a happy face and stay busy-busy-busy because she wants to keep up appearances though she has nowhere to go, is charted as a quickly sketched process. We see the logic of her day, step by step. Here’s where she can casually borrow a shower, or part of a lunch. Here’s where she can stash her stuff for a few hours. Here’s where she can rest for a moment without gathering suspicion. It’s difficult enough being a high schooler, juggling friends, hobbies, jobs. Now add the emotional weight of her situation, the pins-and-needles precariousness of their plight. So when kind friends bolster her desire to audition for a performing arts college — what, you thought the star of Moana wouldn’t get a fine original song to perform here? — it’s nice, and we want her to succeed. But the movie isn’t about a pat happy ending. It finds moments of emotional catharsis, and a few big isn’t-it-pretty-to-think lucky breaks by the end, but leaves its final outcome tantalizingly open-ended. Its heart is in the painful connection between a struggling mother and daughter, whose tensions are based in poverty and constrained choices, whose words wound even and especially when love is at its toughest and most raw. Machado and Cavalho’s scenes together crackle with the immediacy of their present-tense crises while carrying unspoken years of baggage underneath every line. So even when a crusty old lady (Carol Burnett) lets her heart melt a smidgen or a drama teacher (Armisen) lends a kind hand or a friend offers a brief respite, there’s a sense that there’s no easy turnkey to solve this poor girl’s deepest dilemmas. It’s moving in what’s becoming the typical Haley way: drawing open emotional honesty out of stories lesser hands would’ve played for predictable surfaces and sentimentality.

Block Party: NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

Like so many comedy sequels, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is little more than a belabored reason to repeat the first movie’s basic structure and gags, with a lower joke success rate and a sparser humor density. At least in this case the “little more” is interesting. So it’s not nothing, but still quite a bit less enjoyable than the broad, bawdy, and surprisingly thoughtful sight-gag heavy original. It found a frat house (led by Zac Efron) moving in next door to a married couple (Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen) and their baby. This was, of course, an acrimonious situation, generational discomfort agitated into a prank war as the parents sad to see their youth slipping away desperately attempted to get the frat bros evicted. By the end they’d reach some understanding, the bros and the adults going to their separate ways supposedly wiser for the experience. Not so, it turns out, as a sorority moves into the now-empty frat and the cycle starts all over again.

Getting a sorority involved is the movie’s cleverest idea. It allows for an exploration of gendered double standards, explicitly asking if the wild behavior and mean-spirited pranks the girls get up to over the course of the story would be considered quite so extreme if it were done by guys. It’s also a sharp elbow in the side of campus culture, bringing up the totally true rule that sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties. This is why a group of misfit freshmen girls (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein, funny, if somehow underused in their own movie) decide to start up their own off-campus sorority, throwing a bunch of parties with cover charges to pay for rent. It’s empowering after a fashion, a sloppy animal house for the young ladies. Girls can have a dumb raunchy college comedy, too, you know. But, alas, that’s where the movie’s inspiration ends.

That freshness is tied to a retread of its returning characters’ emotional arcs. Why not find something new for Rogen and Byrne to do instead of simply worry about the effect of the out-of-control college kids next door again? Wouldn’t it be funny if they tried a different approach? The stakes are ratcheted up from the last time. Now they’ve bought a new house, are close to closing a deal selling their current one, and are afraid the girls will sink the escrow, leaving them with no choice but to go bankrupt. That’s ominous. But their response is to engage in the exact sort of behavior that got them in over their heads last time. Once more they’re torn about their out-of-touch status and fretting about being good parents while roping in old friends (like Ike Barinholtz) to terrorize the sorority and kicking off another prank war. You’d think they’d know better by now. The new idea they try is a contortion to get Efron back in the mix, this time working with them to help combat the youngsters. This is also the point where you realize age is coming for us all, and recent teen star Efron is closer in age to Rogen than to Moretz. Time marches on and whatnot.

The screenplay cobbled together by director Nicholas Stoller, Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, with co-writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien takes narrative shortcuts to get to jokes and setpieces. Then, once there, it’s not really worth the time. There’s a lengthy sequence set at a tailgate that’s just misjudged and tedious. The parties aren’t as fun or chaotic as the first film’s; nor are the relationships between the sorority sisters sketched out as clearly as the frat bros’. That’s not to say there aren’t funny developments – a handful of Minions-inspired cutaway jokes are almost reason enough to have made the movie – but the lengths to which it goes to generate less of an effect than before is a little dispiriting. So much falls flat and so little seems to be telling a focused story or expressing coherent behavior that it’s just sitting there on screen.

Yet as far as disappointing and unnecessary sequels go, this one’s not actively harmful, just a bit of a drag. The performers have a lot of energy – more than the plot, jokes, and filmmaking know what to do with – and the whole thing has a nice low-key progressive bent. It’s not straining to be open-minded. It just is. There’s a sharp, if occasionally muddled, understanding of what it means to be a woman on a college campus and the sexist lenses with which society at large views them. (Blame the few cheaper moments – like weeping en masse to a sad movie – on the total lack of women in the writer’s room, I suppose.) And there’s something to its casual, natural acceptance. An early scene finds a gay couple’s engagement joyously celebrated by their former frat bros who jump up and down chanting “U.S.A.” That’s a patriotic image in my book. Would that all these good intentions turn the lackluster film around them into something worth the watch.

Straight Outta Inglewood: DOPE

In many ways, Dope is a standard coming-of-age American indie, right down to the buzzy Sundance premiere and self-consciously precious stylization. What saves it from growing insufferable is its energy and perspective. Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) gives the proceedings a loping eccentricity informing each meandering step through a fraught Inglewood odyssey. It stars a good kid in a bad neighborhood, who is pulled away from his path to Harvard through a series of accidents and coincidences, then must work his way back. Complications pile up, and a variety of subplots and supporting characters push each other off screen for puzzling periods of downtime. It’s a movie with too much, finding time in its loose plot for narration on everything from racial authenticity to gay rights, drug dealers debating the morality of drones, and Pharrell-penned musical interludes. It’s too much, but when it settles into an easy groove, it’s a pleasure.

Set in modern day Los Angeles County, high-schooler Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his buddies (Kiersey Clemons and Tony Revolori) look like they stepped out of Yo! MTV Raps in the early 90’s. Self-described black geeks, they love old school hip-hop, playing in a garage band they started after dropping out of marching band, and shopping for vintage gear. The opening narration (delivered smoothly by Forest Whitaker) tells us they aren’t in a gang and don’t do drugs, spending their days dodging dangerous characters while working towards good SAT scores, a fun prom, and going to college. But, with their adolescent urges, they’re always looking for ladies. When a nice girl from the block (Zoë Kravitz) invites them to a birthday party down at the club, they can’t help themselves, even though the guest of honor is a notorious local dope dealer (A$ap Rocky).

Their plans for the future are thrown into doubt when the police break up the party and the dealer stashes his dope in Malcolm’s bag. Our leads escape, but soon those dangerous characters draw near as the trio scrambles to stay alive and get rid of the drugs in a way that’ll get them out of trouble with both cops and criminals. They’re caught between a dealer and a law place. For a while it’s a madcap scramble to get the bag back to its owner, a goal complicated by a rival dealer (Amin Joseph), a slimy businessmen (Roger Guenveur Smith), a high rich girl (Chanel Iman) and her aspiring producer brother (Quincy Brown), and Malcolm’s mom (Kimberly Elise). A tight focus on this crisis, in a one-crazy-After Hours-day mode, rockets the movie along, but soon drifts away as the film swells with misjudged comedy and overcrowded subplots – romantic, academic, criminal, and more – which drain the threat of immediacy.

A sort of slow-motion caper movie, with a supporting cast too sporadically deployed and stereotypically defined to really pop, the key source of interest is Malcolm. Rachel Morrison's smooth cinematography keeps him the center of attention as Moore delivers a loose, funny, charismatic performance. It’s easy to root for the meek geek in over his head in situations out of his control, and Famuyiwa finds workable tonal slipperiness by allowing the central character such fine consistency. Through a gauntlet of disreputable scenarios by turns comic, suspenseful, and sexy, we watch this young man attempt to wrest back agency in his own life and prevent damaging his Ivy League dreams. The way there takes too many detours, but Moore’s allowed to be the sort of performer who immediately draws attention and sympathy whenever he’s on screen. His climactic recitation of his college application essay, looking straight out at the audience before pulling up his hoodie and walking away, is such a powerful moment of rhetoric. It’s almost excusable how uninvolving the film’s back stretch – involving a dumb hacker (Blake Anderson), and some far-fetched contrivances – grows, plus the few extra endings beyond that point.

The telling may be shaggy, but there’s still some appeal in the framing. Matching the main trio’s throwback vibe, Famuyiwa’s direction is similarly inspired by early-90’s culture, specifically the particular indie sensibility birthed by the early successes of Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, John Singleton, and Kevin Smith. There was a period of a few years where all you needed to launch a tiny film project was semi-comic violence, ironic distance, loud politics, dialogue saturated with pop culture patter, and liberal use of split-screens, title cards, arch narration, and malleable chronology. Few of the derivative works were as good as their inspirations, and even some of them weren’t that good. But somehow, twenty years on, there’s some freshness in seeing the old tropes again, especially when brought to a slick hipster synthesis speaking to uniquely modern discourse on race and opportunity (and technology, though dropping the word “bitcoin” a hundred times doesn’t make it as successful a topic here). There’s personality to spare, enough to almost cover up its sloppier parts.