Hot Summer Nights Review
This Film Has Been Rated (Most Likely R)
Imperative Entertainment
2 Hrs
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe, Alex Roe, Maia Mitchell, Thomas Jane, Emory Cohen
REVIEW: After the end of the John Hughes era, a lot of coming of age films has been PG13. It wasn’t The Edge of Seventeen and Dope that opened the door to R-rated adult coming of age movies but a 2012 independent film that did go to SXSW which was Funeral Kings. It had 10-year-old kids cursing their ass off, but it was a good film. It was like a live action South Park without the political humor. So yeah, Hot Summer Nights is not your average coming of age story but rather a bloodier one. So when I see an R rated SXSW coming of age film, I personally hold it up to a Funeral Kings standard. This didn't come close.
American flags wave as fireworks light the sky, it’s 1991 in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and summer is in full swing. A lonely teenage boy is taken under the wing of the town rebel, falls in love with the prettiest girl in town, and gets entangled in a drug ring, all as the deadliest hurricane in New England history barrels towards the coast. This coming of age film marks the feature debut of writer/director Elijah Bynum.
THE GOOD: From the prologue it feels as if Adam Goldberg wrote an R-rated film about his teenage years it would be this. Hot Summer Nights has a lot of influence from The Great Gatsby, Goodfellas, The Goldbergs, any given John Hughes film, and the swish pan and cutaway styling of Edgar Wright. I know I’ve said the same exact thing in my T2 Transporting review, but it's still rather similar. It's remarkable in the sense that this is the feature film debut by Elijah Bynum who puts a lot of passion into his visuals. From the very intro, you feel that you are put into the early 90s by the music, the VHS title fonts. Bynum does a great job throwing his audience into a time machine bringing them 1991. What he also excels at is bringing out the performances of his cast breaking them out into beginning superstars.
Timothée Chalamet’s character Daniel, in the beginning, reminds me of a young Jay Baruchel without the excoriating voice, His character embodies the movement, facial expressions, mannerisms, and social awkwardness of Baruchel. What makes the first third of the movie work is Chalamet's Daniel and Alex Roe’s Hunter Strawberry. The film establishes Strawberry as the coolest guy in Cape Cod. All the guys want to be him and all the girls want to be with him and who can blame them, Strawberry is a badass, so having him into Daniel’s world makes for a very interesting film. Hunter Strawberry is the Jay Gatsby to Daniel’s Nick Carraway without Strawberry referring to him as "young sport". But immediately after they become the Walter White and Jesse Pinkman of weed. Chalamet’s and Roe have a lot of chemistry onscreen that when the betrayal begins everything about their relationship (and the film’s story) begins to fall apart.
THE BAD: Be rest assured this is not your average R-rated coming of age film. It begins as a comedy but then by the 2nd act it immediately loses all humor and life as it just becomes a drama. It's really after Strawberry beats the crap out of a guy. From there you realize the film is both violent and bloody. I respect it for the changing gears of its genre but the tone don’t genuinely shift. It just does an 180-degree spin as it turns from something light into something extremely dark.
You like Daniel because of his social awkwardness in the beginning, but then after he gets too ahead of himself you begin to hate him. From that moment the film just becomes predictable where you don’t get to like our lead. He’s not only an idiot but an idiot that does the opposite of what anyone tells him to do. It's good to follow a flawed character but when your lead character is inexplicably a dumbass then you lose interest in him. ItOne of the first things that is revealed is Hunter is related to Daniel’s love interest McKayla and right when the forbidden love is set every clichéd trope begin to follow. Don’t get me wrong, the cast is great and does such a fantastic job, but every character is one dimensional and barely have any character opposed to attitude and personality.
If that wasn’t enough we’re introduced to new and unnecessary characters an hour into the film only for more predictable shenanigans to follow. For some reason, Mia Mitchell shows up to become Roe’s love interest only of another predictable subplot to set up. You know the film’s third act is coming because of radio announcing a storm when you as an audience member knows everything for everyone is going to go to shit. It's pretty much the radio broadcaster saying,
The film features a kid narrator that displays in nowhere into the store into the story. He’s like a kid Sam Elliot who you don’t see till the very end. It means nothing to the main course of the story, but is just doing this narration that pretty much means nothing. We don’t know who this kid narrator is or what is his purpose. He’s just a narrator. You could tell it was somewhat as an afterthought.
LAST STATEMENT: Elijah Bynum shows a lot of promise as a first time director from his sharp and quick visual styling, but Hot Summer Nights is a generically crafted coming of age film with an unstable tone and clichéd plotting.
Rating: 2/5 | 43%
Super Scene: William Fitchner puts Daniel in his place.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Timothée Chalamet's Performance as Daniel |
Daniel's Character |
| Elijah Bynum's Direction and Visuals | Cliched Characters |
| Alex Roe's Performance | Inclusion of Love Interest Hr Into the Film |
| Maika Monroe | Generic Story |
| 1991! | Useless Narrator |
