Despite having no real idea what this was about before sitting down with it, this wasn't what I expected in the least. I'd heard faint waftings of Timothee Chalamet travelling across the US with a girl he meets, skirting the fringes, but never really getting too involved in honest-to-goodness society per se. Nobody mentioned why, but aah, now I get it.
"When you weigh 140 pounds wet, you need to have a big attitude."
The biggest and most obvious thing to strike me about the project is how it feels it should be a sequel to something much more adventurous. Many is the time I have wondered what happened to characters as the final credits rolled, after their story had been told. You feel that there is a story for these characters that needed telling before we got to where we are introduced to them, and as such, the seemingly random encounters struggle with the context for the unengaged and less gushy viewer.
The performances are strong but I feel an affinity with the locations and sensibilities of the places visited on this roadtrip would provide some benefit to the likes of me who calls a roadtrip anything longer than two hours. My brain simply won't compute and doesn't understand travelling on a journey that can take days to complete. Not without getting on a plane or two, at least. I live in the UK, an island that, whilst not small, can still be traversed from one long end to the other in less than half a day without really hurrying. 'Under the radar' is probably possible, but decidedly more tricky a feat to pull off.
Nice direction, but it's a difficult geographical listlessness which feels like what this is for most parts. I'm way too old to be moved by first love, even if it is all-consuming (sic) and it definitely helps to be a Chalamet fanboy/girl/something in between, which I'm sorry to admit, I'm really, really not. At times there is poignancy and some truly heartfelt moments, but for me this only really properly comes to life when Rylance is on screen, who is woefully underused.