How to Talk to Girls at Parties

It’s been eight long years since John Cameron Mitchell’s Rab­bit Hole land­ed Nicole Kid­man an Oscar nom­i­na­tion. As such, the prospect of the direc­tor return­ing to his anar­chic roots with a script based on a Neil Gaiman short sto­ry is – in the­o­ry at least – a wel­come one. How to Talk to Girls at Par­ties sells itself as a cos­mic com­ing-of-age sto­ry, con­cern­ing aliens, punk, and the tran­scen­den­tal nature of true love.

Awk­ward teenage punk Enn (Alex Sharp) encoun­ters the mys­te­ri­ous Zan (Elle Fan­ning) after he and his row­dy friends acci­den­tal­ly crash a strange house par­ty in Croy­don. It’s revealed that she’s part of an alien enclave tour­ing earth – not so much man­ic pix­ie dream girl as robot­ic alien dream girl – and (for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son) she becomes enam­oured with Enn, abscond­ing from her extra-ter­res­tri­al cohort to spend time ​‘doing punk’ with Enn and his friends.

‘Doing punk’ is all very nice and friend­ly in this ver­sion of 1977 Lon­don – the teenagers lis­ten to records, go to gigs put on by Nicole Kidman’s Queen Boadicea, who hams it up mag­nif­i­cent­ly and style-wise, appears to be chan­nelling David Bowie as The Gob­lin King in Labyrinth. At one point, Zan cuts her dress with a pair of scis­sors, and Enn exclaims excit­ed­ly, ​‘Now that’s punk!’ There’s a cud­dly, cos­tumey sort of feel to it all, like watch­ing an approx­i­ma­tion of punk that’s been sani­tised for mass-mar­ket con­sump­tion – but that doesn’t stop misog­y­ny sneak­ing in through the lech­er­ous teenage boys and patri­ar­chal alien community.

The chief con­cern with How to Talk to Girls at Par­ties is it ​‘feels like’ many things, but nev­er an entire­ly orig­i­nal idea – cer­tain­ly not in the way Cameron Mitchell’s past work has. Part Roman Hol­i­day, part ET, part Vivi­enne West­wood mar­ket knock-off, it feels tonal­ly mis­matched, and it’s dif­fi­cult to real­ly invest in the romance at the heart of the sto­ry when there’s so lit­tle chem­istry between Sharp and Fan­ning. In padding out the 18-page source mate­r­i­al, Cameron Mitchell and his screen­writ­ing part­ner Philip­pa Goslett over­com­pli­cate the poet­ry of Gaiman’s orig­i­nal writ­ing, and cre­ate some­thing that doesn’t have any­thing inter­est­ing or mem­o­rable to say.