Turning 30 fucking sucks. Too old to be considered young, yet too young to have everything figured out (as if anyone ever really has it figured out), 30-year-olds are cursed with the responsibility of adulthood while still feeling like the kid in Tom Hanks’ clothes at the end of Big. It’s one of life’s great reality checks, and all you can do is choose how to face it: lie down and take it like a beating, or accept the passing of time with equanimity. But the heroes of Sour Party — a low budget, bootstrapped comedy recently given the stamp of approval by none other than Steven Soderbergh — take a third route: rage, rage, against the coming of age. 30 comes whether we want it to, but maturity may not.
Gwen and James live together in blissful arrested development on L.A.’s lower frequency, scraping by on grit and credit card debt. Interrupting one of their get-rich-quick schemes, Gwen’s sister Augustine calls to remind Gwen of her baby shower, and all Augustine wants is for Gwen to show up on time. Gwen, however, insists that she buy a present for the baby despite having no money, simply to prove she is grown up enough to do so. Thus, Gwen and James cavort across Los Angeles in search of $150 by attempting to extort various friends and acquaintances.
In the wrong hands, a movie like this would be insufferable because the entire conflict derives from the protagonist refusing to accept the obvious solution right in front of her. Instead, directors the Drextons (one of whom, Amanda, performs double duty by starring as James) filter the Frances Ha-ish tomfoolery through the lens of Pineapple Express: Sour Party is raunchy, mischievous, and only a little pretentious. Unlike a lot of the dirty water hot dogs that have been processed through the A24/Neon industrial factories, it feels like a true independent film. Shots are direct, close-ups often photographed with wide angle lenses; superimpositions look as if they were downloaded from a website advertising free fonts and imported into Adobe Premiere; and psychedelia is indicated the old-fashioned way — with lighting and in-camera tricks. The film wears its constraints on its sleeve, and to get a real sense of its spirit, we actually have to go farther back than the 2000s comedy.
Sour Party is at its best when reminiscent of ’90s indie boom movies like The Watermelon Woman, Clerks, and Slacker (all around 30 years old) — affable and scrappy and exuding an amateur charm, shot through with a sense of possibility despite their formal limitations. And Sour Party is, in fact, funnier in the cut than anywhere else. It’s a great achievement for a comedy put together with scotch tape and super glue to produce its greatest laughs visually: a gigantic period stain on Gwen’s sweatpants that looks like a shit stain, a dance routine under neon featuring dry ice that floats out of the girls’ asses like fart clouds, and the recitation of a mantra of abundance nestled next to a shot of a stack of past due bills.
The dialogue, however, feels forced. Written to sound smart instead of coming from a place within the characters, it pokes weak fun at various troubles plaguing Los Angeles at the moment. The New Age rage sweeping Zillenial culture gets lampooned, and so does the mass exodus plaguing L.A. As such, the characters are a little grating, and their exaggerated reactions to the state of the world strike one as insincere. The film’s L.A. is also mostly suggested rather than depicted, and we don’t really get to experience it from the perspective of a broke 30-something; it simply passes us by in the window. There is one moment that screams authentic L.A., though. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway to the baby shower, Gwen complains of excruciating pain from the UTI she contracted sitting in a hot tub with a man she hoped to swipe some cash from. James only has an Alan Watts tape from her lucid dreaming class, so she puts that on to distract Gwen. The Drextons then cut to a shot of the car rolling along the freeway with birds soaring in the distance. It’s funny and a little moving: the filthy, dirty mess of everyday life under the calm, orderly incantations of a mindfulness guru. It’s pure Los Angeles.
There’s a profundity in Sour Party that could only arise from the ooze of zaniness — a willingness to smash things together like a kid with her toys — the likes of which flourished in classic Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows (also around 30 years old now). It prevents the movie from tilting into pure generational nihilism, so that when Gwen and James intone “Everything is fucked,” it registers as sage words for a challenging period in American life and sage words for anybody turning 30 at any time. This writer is about to turn 30, just quit a full-time job, and is struggling to come to terms with what his place in the world looks like beyond the halcyon 20s. It’s good to know the movies can still make us feel less alone.
DIRECTOR: The Drextons; CAST: Samantha Westervelt, Amanda Drexton, Corey Feldman, Douglas Bennett; DISTRIBUTOR: Anchor Bay Entertainment; STREAMING: July 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 22 min.
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