The 30 Breakout Performers & Filmmakers Of The 2017 Sundance Film Festival - Page 2 of 3

Beach RatsHarris Dickinson – “Beach Rats”
Eliza Hittman’s underseen and underrated breakthrough “It Felt Like Love,” which screened at Sundance four years ago, showed her to be a director with not just a keen facility for the complexities of coming-of-age and teen sexuality, but also a real eye for talent (Gina Piersanti giving an amazing performance as the lead there). Follow-up “Beach Rats,” which tackles some similar themes but from the perspective of a young Brooklyn boy who escapes his dying father by heading to a cruising beach to hook up with older men, has picked up strong reviews in Park City the last few days, and while Hittman was already firmly on our radars, its young star Harris Dickinson very much arrives on it thanks to the film. Actually hailing from the U.K., where he’s had a few TV and theater roles already despite just being 20, he’s won glowing notices from the Sundance press — “his lost quality keeps us in a melancholy grip,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter. And he’s already booking major gigs off the back of it — he’ll star with Amandla Stenberg in Fox’s YA adaptation “Darkest Minds.”

Thoroughbred

Cory Finley – “Thoroughbred”
We were a little suspicious of “Thoroughbred” in advance: Its story of two wealthy Connecticut girls (previous festival breakouts Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy) who hire a street hustler (Anton Yelchin, in his final performance) to kill one of their stepfathers sounded like it could be a tin-eared, sub Bret Easton Ellis-ish piece on paper. But the film was one of the early talking points of the festival (and sold to Focus for $5 million), and looks to be the making of its writer-director, Cory Finley. A rising New York playwright whose horror-tinged work “The Feast” won plenty of fans back in 2015, this sees Finley adapt his own stage play into a surprisingly cinematic picture, drawing comparisons to Kubrick and classic noir, while drawing strong performances from all its leads. It looks likely to prove one of the festival’s biggest crossover hits, and should open all kinds of doors for its disgustingly young creator.

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Sabbah Folayan & Damon Davis – “Whose Streets?”
In the next four years, documentary film is going to become ever more vital and in need of protection, and no non-fiction film at Sundance seemed to be more vital than documentary “Whose Streets?” from first-time directors Sabbah Folayan and Damon Davis. The pair come from backgrounds in activism as well as art (Folayan was in the theater, Davis is an interdisciplinary artist) who documented the protests in late-2014 Ferguson from a street level — they were both organizers there as well. It gives them a valuable perspective on events, but from most of the rave reviews, it sounds like they’ve done a great job at balancing activism with journalism, displaying different perspectives and voices while still making clear when injustices are being done. No distributor has stepped up yet, but when they do, expect it to be one of the most talked-about docs of the year.

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Helene Hegemann & Jasna Fritzi Bauer – “Axolotl Overkill”
The director of this taboo-busting German coming-of-age movie was not only one of the youngest at the festival (if not the youngest), but probably also the most notorious going in. Hegemann is still only 24, but was just 17 when her first novel (on which the new film was based) was published, only to be accused of plagiarizing much of it (she would later defend it as “cutting and pasting”). Similar accusations haven’t followed her film adaptation, which follows a troubled, grieving teen as she has an affair with an older woman and a variety of men. Our review isn’t up yet, but it’s an impressive, impressionistic and raw debut that suggests Hegemann is a born filmmaker, and that her lead Jasna Fritzi Bauer (who appeared in Christian Petzold’s “Barbara,” among others) is a talent to match her.

Danielle Macdonald in "Patti Cakes" ("Patti Cake$")Danielle Macdonald & Geremy Jasper – “Patti Cake$”
A weird trend of the last few years is frontmen of obscure indie bands from the early ’00s becoming noted indie directors. Shawn Christensen, who was the vocalist in *stellastarr back in the day, won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short and has his second feature “Sidney Hall” at the festival this year; and now Geremy Jasper, who led art-poppers The Fever, has broken out thanks to one of the buzziest films in Park City, “Patti Cake$.” It leans on musical elements, though in a very different way: It’s about a young New Jersey bartender on a mission to become a famous rapper. Jasper wrote 19 original songs for the film as well as helming, and turned out a movie that was one of the fest’s biggest crowd-pleasers, and biggest deals, selling to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million. But he might not even be the film’s biggest breakout — Danielle Macdonald, an Australian actress with credits in Zal Batmanglij’s “The East,” Amy Berg’s “Every Secret Thing” and the last season of “American Horror Story,” plays the title role and knocks it out of the park: “She’s simply a revelation,” wrote Greg in his review.

LATimes_still05Michelle Morgan – “L.A. Times”
It’s possibly unfair, but after years of experience, the idea of a comedy-drama about the relationship dramas of a 30-something aspiring screenwriter living in L.A. is something that would ordinarily send us scurrying for the hills — there are roughly 400,000 of those movies, and they’re almost all awful. But when Noel saw “L.A. Times,” which is written by, directed by and stars Michelle Morgan, he found it to be, while a bit of a “calling-card project,” a “funny and charming” movie with “sparkling, sophisticated jokes,” comparing her to Whit Stillman and Woody Allen. Morgan is herself an actress and screenwriter, who penned Kristen Wiig vehicle “Girl Most Likely” and is currently working on the sequel to “The Lego Movie,” and after Sundance short “K.I.T.,” really finds a showcase for her talent here, and you’ll likely be seeing a lot more of her both in front of and behind the camera.

The Big Sick

Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon – “The Big Sick”
Judd Apatow‘s track record for boosting talent as a producer is a formidable one: Over the years, he’s helped to launch A-list comedy writers and performers including Steve Carell, James Franco, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer to movie stardom. The latest beneficiary of this are Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote (and starred, in “Silicon Valley” actor Nanjiani’s case) Apatow-produced rom-com “The Big Sick,” maybe the biggest hit of the festival. Nanjiani and Gordon are a real-life married couple, and the film is based on their difficult courtship, which saw them dealing with both pressure from Nanjiani’s family to marry a Pakistani woman and a life-threatening illness that Gordon suffered, with Zoe Kazan playing the Gordon surrogate. With Ray Romano and Holly Hunter among the supporting cast, and comedy vet Michael Showalter helming, it proved a true crowd-pleaser in Park City (“Right down to the tearjerking final moments, this is a movie where every detail isn’t just thought-out, but lived-through,” Noel wrote in his review), and landed the biggest deal of the festival, selling to Amazon for a whopping $12 million, and launching Nanjiani as a leading man and Gordon as a screenwriter.