Kaboom

After 2004’s hard-hit­ting child abuse dra­ma Mys­te­ri­ous Skin, the mild highs of 2007’s ston­er com­e­dy Smi­ley Face were enough for some to whis­per that Gregg Ara­ki had gone soft. Four years on, the LA film­mak­er has answered those crit­ics with an emphat­ic, ono­matopoe­ic bitch slap.

A spicy, genre-mash­ing valen­tine to youth­ful exu­ber­ance and sex­u­al exper­i­men­ta­tion, Kaboom fol­lows a group of unbear­ably gor­geous coeds who become embroiled in a night­mar­ish mur­der mys­tery, as envi­sioned through the hal­lu­cino­genic gaze of the film’s chief pro­tag­o­nist, Smith (Thomas Dekker).

With the lines between fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty teas­ing­ly blurred, Ara­ki lets loose, immers­ing us in a world of sweaty casu­al sex and apoc­a­lyp­tic psy­che­delia. Promis­cu­ous witch­es and an ani­mal mask-wear­ing cult haunt Smith’s twist­ed fic­tion; only for his grow­ing para­noia to be waved away by caus­tic gal pal Stel­la (Haley Ben­nett) and freespir­it­ed fuck bud­dy Lon­don (Juno Tem­ple). Is Smith just trip­ping, or are their more sin­is­ter demons at work?

Ara­ki is at his best when his broad influ­ences are dis­tilled into a cohe­sive nar­ra­tive. Here, how­ev­er, scat­ter­shot, idio­syn­crat­ic flour­ish­es smoth­er both plot and char­ac­ters; tan­gents sim­mer and fade before they’re ever allowed to seduce. This is vin­tage Ara­ki – sen­su­al, dead­pan, fierce­ly lo-fi – but the fan-pleas­ing the­mat­ic par­al­lels with the writer/director’s excel­lent ​‘Teenage Apoc­a­lypse Tril­o­gy’ aren’t giv­en the breath­ing space required to appeal to a wider audience.

Even so, for raw, unadul­ter­at­ed escapism, Kaboom is hard to beat. Ara­ki is a solid­er of the sub­ver­sive, and his self-made style of exper­i­men­tal­ism has long been a jew­el in the crown of Amer­i­can indie cin­e­ma. But this lat­est tale of world-weary Cal­i­forn­ian teens some­how feels less organ­ic, less pure. The jew­el has lost its lus­ter a lit­tle. The nihilis­tic feroc­i­ty of Total­ly F***ed Up, Nowhere and The Doom Gen­er­a­tion is blunter, the suck­er punch­es of those ear­ly films now glanc­ing blows.

Kaboom is roman­tic, nos­tal­gic and intro­spec­tive, but as an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal com­men­tary on col­lege life it’s sur­pris­ing­ly enig­mat­ic, offer­ing lit­tle insight into why Ara­ki has cho­sen to indulge in self-reflec­tion at this junc­ture in his career. Per­haps Stel­la sums it up best: ​“Col­lege is just an inter­mis­sion between high school and the rest of your life. Four years of hav­ing sex, mak­ing stu­pid mis­takes and expe­ri­enc­ing stuff. It’s a pit stop, not the Sec­ond Com­ing of the Messiah.”

Still, the fact that Kaboom was dec­o­rat­ed with the first ever Queer Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val is a sign that, almost 25 years into his film­mak­ing career, Ara­ki has become as impor­tant to today’s LGBT gen­er­a­tion as John Waters was to his. Con­tem­po­rary gay cin­e­ma doesn’t need a Mes­si­ah, but it does need Ara­ki, because while Kaboom isn’t a return to his best form, he is by some stretch its most bold and dynam­ic ambassador.