Punk provocateur Adam Rehmeier surveys America’s putrefying suburbs in this unconventional coming-of-ager.
Director Adam Rehmeier shocked many with his 2011 debut feature The Bunny Game. Notably, the British Board of Film Classification declared the extreme horror title, in which a sex worker is abducted and tortured by a truck driver, to be “unsuitable for classification”. Two films and a decade later, Rehmeir remains a provocateur and has evidently developed a dark sense of humour.
Rehmeir’s punk coming-of-ager Dinner in America is fierce from the get-go. Profane, ridiculously-coiffured Simon (Kyle Gallner) is booted out of a drug research facility and invited back to fellow pharmaceutical test-pilot Beth’s home for food and sex. At Beth’s suburban Detroit home, Simon snogs Beth’s mum (Back to the Future’s Lea Thompson), trashes the family dining room and theatrically torches their garden hedge. The whole bonkers sequence might be superfluous, but it’s a hilarious example of Simon’s disdain for authority.
After a pit stop with his drug supplier, Simon evades the police on a fire escape in view of downtrodden pet store worker Patty (Emily Skeggs). Patty refuses to grass him up and soon Simon inveigles his way into her house and family life. It transpires Simon is also John Q Public – the angry frontman of local hardcore band PsyOps and a man who Patty routinely sends love letters and poetry. The two become friends and romantically involved.
This is the only predictable part of Dinner in America. Angry Simon and naïve Patty are a winning partnership and the chemistry between Gallner and Skeggs is one of the film’s best assets. It’s uplifting as they create (excellent) music and Patty grows in confidence, righting wrongs with school bullies and the pet store boss who unfairly fired her.
Gallner’s funny and furious performance is often uncompromisingly vicious, but anyone who grew up in the stultifying suburbs can empathise with why Simon feels the way he does and the desire to be anywhere else. If his ire is expressed in brash and unpleasant fashion, well, sometimes conformity has to be challenged. When he’s not challenging, he’s pretending to be from a family of missionaries building churches in Tanzania during the film’s funniest scene.
Heathers is an obvious reference point, yet while Dinner partly shares that film’s dark comic tone, ’90s US teen movie connoisseurs will detect more of a Pump Up the Volume and Welcome to the Dollhouse flavour – Patty’s early awkwardness certainly seems to echo through from the latter film. Does Rehmeir side with the dorks or the punks? Maybe both. By the end of Dinner in America, when we finally see PsyOps take the stage, we’re certainly on his side.
Published 26 May 2021
A director who can shock, but can he make a decent coming-of-age film?
Funny, angry, unusual. That’ll do.
Too fierce for suburbanites but ace for everyone else.
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