A previous dispatch from this year’s SXSW highlighted how so many of the horror films here seem to be almost existential in their questioning who we want to be in the 2020s as technology continues to redefine the human condition. The funny thing is that several of the comedies this year also contain existential foundations regarding how we define ourselves whether it’s through high school popularity, online drama, or even joining a cult. They all have elements that can feel a bit sitcom-y although two of them overcome those foundations to find something truthful and funny, while the third can never get over what its broad sense of humor does to flatten its characters.
The best of the bunch, although just barely, is Will Ropp’s clever “Brian,” a film that I like for more than just its awesome name. Written by Mike Scollins, “Brian” is at its best when it digs below the abrasive personality of its titular character, a high school student who pushes past awkward to obnoxious. It’s not unfair to say that it’s a film with echoes of “Napoleon Dynamite,” but it’s willing to ask if these quirky comedy protagonists might also have a notable degree of mental illness. Brian (Ben Wang) seems at first to just be another weird teenager, but there’s something darker under the surface of his outbursts and when Ropp takes Brian’s panic attacks seriously, his film defies some of its coming-of-age tropes. Of course, it helps to have Randall Park to just come in and nail several scene-ending punchlines like a comedy assassin.
Brian is a movie kid we’ve seen before: the most bullied at his high school until he meets a new kid named Justin (Joshua Colley), an outgoing young man who helps bring Brian out of his shell. When Brian isn’t suffering full-on panic attacks (what he calls “freak outs”) at school, he’s pining for one of his teachers (Natalie Morales) or dodging insults from his obnoxious older brother (Sam Song Li). His mother (Edi Patterson) wants to protect Brian, but she also gives him the space to figure out who he wants to be, and he’s decided that, in order to get closer to his teacher crush, he’s going to run for Class President against the pretty boy who has never had opposition before and a vocal feminist who wants to change the school government from within.
Wang understands this character well, rarely giving into traditional comedy tropes of the “bullied nerd.” He humanizes Brian in a way that’s essential to the success of the film, allowing us to care about what happens to a kid who can truly be kind of a jerk. That’s also a positive quality of Ropp’s film in that they don’t get overly sentimental in their presentation of Brian or his arc. By refusing easy outs, “Brian” feels more like a character study than your average teen comedy. We may not all be able to see ourselves in the quirky Brian, but it’s the film’s desire to be specific instead of some idea of universal that makes it work. Brian doesn’t have an easy life, but neither do a lot of teenagers. Heck, most adults, too.
At its core, Chelsea Devantez’s “Basic” is also about people figuring out who they are through the emotionally fraught world of social media and ex-partners. It turns that high school isn’t the only place where popularity and identity lead to irrational behavior. In this case, it’s the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, thinking that her perfect online persona is a challenge to her own happiness. Of course, there’s more to her than meets the Instagram.
Ashley Park is excellent as Gloria, a woman who wonders why her boyfriend Nick (Taylor John Smith) doesn’t post any photos of them online. After all, he posted non-stop when he dated the gorgeous Kaylinn (Leighton Meester), and so Gloria is constantly seeing photos of Nick in a happy relationship with someone else. It doesn’t help that Kaylinn has resurfaced in their online life, commenting on one of Nick’s photos. What does she want? Gloria decides to turn her cyberstalking into the real thing and tracks down Kaylinn, only to realize that jealousy goes both ways.
The best elements of “Basic” illuminate how so much of our online lives are a lie. We can only see part of the picture when we look at happy couples on our social feeds, and we make assumptions about how much better other people have it than we do, forgetting that everyone shapes their online lives to give a desired effect. Park and Meester are excellent, finding different comic rhythms that truly allows “Basic” to become more than its title. The first half can feel a little thin, and the whole thing relies way too much on voiceover, but that falls away with Meester and Park’s comic chemistry as two very different women who discover their common ground.
The characters in Victoria Strouse’s “Seekers of Infinite Love” are also trying to find common ground, but none of it feels true enough to register beyond their thin characters in a sitcom plot. A new entry in one of my least favorite subgenres—comedies about families who have to go on a road trip to learn to be decent to each other—“Seekers” stars some incredibly talented people, but they get lost in a film that doesn’t have actual human behavior. It’s one of those movies in which the characters are pushed around by sitcom beats instead of doing or saying things that feel organic. Some of the laughs come just because this cast is so undeniably talented, but they eventually succumb to a project that never really figured out what it was seeking.
Strouse was smart to cast her film with people who have proven their skill at acerbic comedy, especially the wonderful “Hacks” Emmy winner Hannah Einbinder, who plays Kayla. She arrives at her lawyer brother’s (John Reynolds of “Search Party”) office with her brother (Griffin Gluck of “American Vandal”) only to learn that their sister Scarlett (Justine Lupe) has joined the cult that gives this film its title. Scarlett’s siblings hire an expert in cult extraction (Justin Theroux) to get her back, but Kayla’s fear of flying forces them into a road trip to retrieve Scarlett before a mass suicide makes that impossible.
Clearly, this ensemble knows how to sell a broad comedy that features pit stops at a fat camp and a car chase after a child is kidnapped, but they can’t push through the sitcomish nature of the overall script enough to sell it. We end up knowing almost nothing about these characters other than how they annoy each other (and us), making it difficult to root for them to reach their destination. In a SXSW of comedies about where we’re going, this one gets lost.
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