A teen dropout suf­fers for his art in the first trail­er for Fun­ny Pages

Artists think they know every­thing, teenagers think they know every­thing, and when the two over­lap, the lev­els of self-destruc­tive self-assur­ance can be cat­a­stroph­ic. Just take a look at ado­les­cent car­toon­ist Robert, the pro­tag­o­nist of the upcom­ing Fun­ny Pages, who begins the film by announc­ing to his par­ents that he’s learned every­thing that can pos­si­bly be gained from school and will soon drop out to focus on his career that doesn’t quite exist yet.

That scene opens the first trail­er for Owen Kline​‘s debut fea­ture, announced today by dis­trib­u­tor A24 for a late-sum­mer release. From there, the head­strong Robert stum­bles from one calami­ty to the next as he finds a derelict apart­ment and befriends its eccen­tric — but pos­si­bly genius, though also pos­si­bly not — inhabitants.

Pro­duced by the Safdie broth­ers through their Elara Pic­tures shin­gle, the film focus­es on a young man not so dif­fer­ent from the pair or Hol­ly­wood kid Kline (son to Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates), shrug­ging off his life of lux­u­ry to immerse him­self in a scuzzi­er and more artis­ti­cal­ly enrich­ing scene. He soon dis­cov­ers just how lit­tle he knows of the world, how­ev­er, once the has-been artist (Matthew Maher) he gloms onto as a men­tor reveals him­self to be an unsta­ble wack­job, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly in the tor­ment­ed-bril­liance way.

At the film’s Cannes pre­mière ear­li­er this spring, edi­tor Han­nah Strong was bull­ish on the ​“dark­ly amus­ing” film’s low-key humor and appre­ci­a­tion for odd­balls’ strange pas­sions. As she wrote in her review: ​“This might appear to be the set-up for a charm­ing inter­gen­er­a­tional bud­dy com­e­dy, but Owen Kline’s debut fea­ture Fun­ny Pages glee­ful­ly wrong­foots view­ers in its explo­ration of artis­tic impuls­es and the rela­tion­ship between craft and creativity.”

If noth­ing else, Amer­i­ca is about to fall in love with ​“Uh! Oh!” by Alvin and the Chip­munks rip-off act The Nut­ty Squir­rels, a sound­track cut from the film that’s been play­ing on repeat at Lit­tle White Lies HQ since we first heard it in May. Until everyone’s free to enjoy this hys­ter­i­cal, idio­syn­crat­ic film, we can enjoy the heli­um-voiced scatting.

Fun­ny Pages comes to select cin­e­mas and On Demand ser­vices on 26 August.