It’s been a rocky old road for Jack Begert’s Junk. Premiering at Sundance 2024 under the title Little Death, the film won the NEXT Innovation Award, but also got a deserved kicking for its use of AI in its animations. It was brought back home, had twenty-odd minutes lopped off, by all accounts the AI’s been cleared out (though looking at the film’s visual effects, its fingerprints are definitely there), and evidently it’s had a name change, presumably as least due in part to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’s slasher villain from earlier in the year — but also, you can assume, to give it a clean run at things for its MUBI release.
The Frankenstein’s monster of a film we’re left with follows two parallel stories of addiction in L.A. In the first, we follow two young users (Talia Ryder and Dominic Fike) as a burglary goes south, which in the process causes them to lose both her car and his (almost literally) big bag full of dreams. We then track their journey through the dealers and burnouts of nocturnal L.A. as they try to get it all back. In the other narrative thread, Martin (David Schwimmer) is a TV screenwriter with aspirations of grander things as he writes for a shitey body-swap comedy, ruins his marriage chasing a woman from a dream, and gets deeper and deeper into consuming vast quantities of prescription pills, losing his grip on reality in the process.
One of the key issues taken with Little Death at the time of its Sundance premiere was the way it handled these two stories structurally. Split straight down the middle, criticism noted that it lent the feeling of two separate films ham-fistedly glued together, a cinematic Catdog if you will. That criticism’s clearly been taken to heart, as the two narratives are no longer bifurcated in this way, instead — barring a very brief prologue — the screenwriter section bursts out of nowhere in the center of the film as if it were a baby Xenonorph and the Ryder/Fike sections John Hurt’s chest. Functionally, this re-shape shifts the film’s primary focus to the two younger characters, and it’s not hard to see why — this is where the film’s best moments lie. Fike hasn’t proven to be a great actor, but Ryder here displays a similar wayward charisma to what displayed in Sweet East, and it lends the duo’s chemistry the bedded-in quality of people who, despite clear love between them, are both bound together and held apart by their addictions. There’s a degree of style to it as well, even if they’re the kind of visuals that you can tell begin with a reverence for Wong Kar-wai before being homeopathically diluted through Euphoria and big-budget music videos, until all you’re left with is a faintly handsome nighttime glow.
But just as you settle into the opening section’s rhythms — which operate according to a Safdie-esque sense of tumbling consequence crossed with a dream pop Pinterest page — the screenwriter section smashes through the wall with a mighty “Oh yeah!” Unfortunately, it’s more of an oh no development for Junk. It’s not just that Schwimmer’s character is unlikable to the point that it’s tough to care what happens to him — he’s a whining misogynist with no sense of humor — and it’s not that nothing all that interesting happens to him. Rather, it’s the sheer neediness of the filmmaking that truly rankles. Begert attempts to articulate the central characters’ gripes through a kind of surrealism that never manages to rise above merely annoying, the affected eccentricity of a wacky workmate cornering you by the kettle. During this section, for instance, it’s suggested that the the male protagonist of his script be changed to a woman, and so Schwimmer changes into Gaby Hoffman for a couple of scenes. In this situation, Hoffman at least does a good job of things, but it’s just all a bit limp, neither funny nor involving enough to win viewers over, particularly when these developments seem so confused as to what the point is. Sure, plenty of Hollywood screenwriters are probably annoying, and yes, some people find the grind of life so soul-destroying that the only way to find meaning is to fill it with so many prescription meds that the chaos it brings is at least meaningful. But what this section of the film articulates about all this beyond “bad that, isn’t it?” — in the style of Adam McKay at his most “Look at me, I’m directing!” — is very little indeed.
And so, despite the re-edit, Junk‘s component parts still sit uncomfortably together. No restructuring can convincingly turn ‘”Everyone’s an addict” and “We’re all searching for meaning, aren’t we?” into great unifying points in and of themselves. At that point, one is simply relying on the telling of the story in all its intertwined details, and for too much of the Junk just is not there. Even the film’s stronger hafl loses its way a little toward the end, its Hollywood glamor beginning to infect the narrative in unconvincing fashion. Though understandable given its tortuous process to get to this point, Junk‘s winding road to release and the hodgepodging required to locate its final shape makes for a film that is wildly uneven, one that for all its huffing and puffing can’t find its feet in any satisfying way.
DIRECTOR: Jack Begert; CAST: David Schwimmer, Talia Ryder, Dominic Fike, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; STREAMING: October 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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