It’s the plight of the plightless: a kid from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background wants to be some manner of artist, except that he’s (and it does seem to be a he more often than not) bereft of the experience, grit, or outsider credibility that define the role models he hopes he could one-day call influences. He ventures out into the big bad world in search of something to put a bit of hair on his creative chest, only to face the spiny question of whether this effort to get real is just class tourism, a jaunt in the gutter that one phone call to Dad could prevent. These charges have been frequently levied against Benny and Josh Safdie, oddballs from a somewhat well-heeled background insinuating themselves in the grubbiest pockets of subculture New York has to offer. They’re also producers on “Funny Pages,” the new film written and directed by Owen Kline, a guy who knows a thing or two about the limitations of privilege.
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Born into the Hollywood firmament with Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates for parents, having made an auspicious entrée to screen acting at age fourteen as a furtive masturbator in “The Squid and the Whale,” he now faces the daunting question of what to do with all the advantages he’s been granted by circumstance. His response is a consistently funny yet narratively undercooked coming-of-age story that ends before our boy Robert (Daniel Zolghadri, the peer-pressuring creep from “Eighth Grade”) can come of age. Kline has a sober and self-aware perspective, a winningly off-kilter sense of humor, and a scuzzy yet sumptuous aesthetic (informed in large part by cinematographer Sean Price Williams), well on his way to being the capital-F Filmmaker suggested by his onscreen avatar’s ambitions. Which makes it all the more frustrating that his debut ends so abruptly as to feel incomplete, excusing itself before anything can be done with its hard-won insights.
Robert’s dead-set on a job in comics, or rather comix, small-press cheapo books rich in raunch and other forms of nose-thumbing subversion. The sheltered teen understands that his idols — R. Crumb and his cohort, though the emphasis has been placed on lesser-known names — were all fringe weirdoes opening themselves up to the ugliness and obscenity of common life. Feeling disillusioned after witnessing the death of one such eccentric, the art teacher (Pulitzer-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis) who made his studio a sanctuary for students misunderstood elsewhere, Robert decides to forego college and try his hand at starving for his art. He shuns his parents’ stately colonial and finds a basement-level Trenton apartment just derelict enough to afford, overheated and cramped and so visually rank we can almost smell the upsetting odors wafting off the screen.
A day job in a public defender’s office acquaints him with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a former color mixer with comix industry experience, and Robert sees the mentor he’s been waiting for. Ignoring the man’s apparent mental instability and self-confessed lack of involvement in the core of the artistic process, Robert attaches himself to a guy who can’t stop courting calamity, and gets caught in his undertow. They bounce between absurd set pieces pitched at the frantic, motormouthed chaos of “Frownland” (its director Ronald Bronstein also has a producer credit here), from a misbegotten confrontation at a pharmacy to a farcical Christmas morning to which Robert invites Wallace without notifying his parents. Kline feints toward Robert realizing that Wallace isn’t all that brilliant, or that his own professional determination could be turning him into a bit of a dick to the friend (Miles Emanuel) he thinks he’s outgrowing. But the gaping hole where the third act should be, cuts all that off, to the point that its deliberate non-resolution doesn’t register as a choice, but rather the absence of one.
The film is best appreciated as a salute to obscurity, charmed with forgotten novelties and thrilled by their rediscovery. The soundtrack consists of gems dug from crates far off the beaten path, most notably “Uh! Oh!,” the lone Top 40 hit from brazen Alvin and the Chipmunks ripoff act The Nutty Squirrels. Casting director Jennifer Venditti has assembled a murderer’s row of tri-state character actors (Louise Lasser, Maria Dizzia, Josh Pais, Marcia DeBonis) and assorted looney tunes (erstwhile Three Loko affiliate Andy Milonakis, the “Cliffwood Crooner” Michael Townsend Wright). Kline proves that he’s put in the work and knows his stuff, going so low-rent that he can’t be accused of coasting on nepotistic favor. As a director, he may still have some growth ahead of him, but this re-introduction gives viewers more than enough cause to follow him on that path. [B-]
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