A scene from Daydream Nation.Ed Araquel
In Michael Goldbach's smart, if mildly maddening, directorial feature debut, Daydream Nation, an urbane high-school senior, Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings), moves with her widowed father to a backwater town that sounds too bad to be true. A perpetual industrial fire covers the town in black smoke, the teenaged population is on drugs and a serial killer in a white suit is on a rampage. For good measure, Caroline tells us, this was also the year her father developed the first symptoms of his terminal cancer.
By conventional rules, all this misery seems excessive, but Goldbach's debut film (he also co-wrote Don McKellar's Childstar) is less a memoir than a mordant apocalyptic teen fantasy. Cinematographer Jon Joffin's dreamy dissolves use slow-motion moments of magic realism and muted landscapes (shot around Fort Langley, B.C.) to portray a world lived at the fragile psychological edge. The alternative rock soundtrack (Emily Haines, Stars, Constantines) augments the too-wistful-to-breathe mood.
At the same time, Daydream Nation (named after the seminal 1988 Sonic Youth indie rock album) is something of a bitter-coated sugar pill. Beneath the gloomy smoke, it's another impudently witty, bright-girl-comes-of-age fable along the lines of Clueless, Ghost World and Juno. Caroline is no mope; she's a bombshell ready to explode and the first item on her town-improvement agenda is to seduce her handsome English teacher, Barry Anderson (Josh Lucas). Asked to write an essay on the historical person she most admires, she picks Monica Lewinsky, which naturally gets his attention. Anderson, a faux hipster with aspirations toward literary bohemia, offers little resistance. Initially creepily eager and nervous, Anderson eventually becomes farcically unhinged. At the same time, Caroline strikes a connection with a boy her own age, the wounded stoner Thurston (the soulful Reece Thompson). In the film's frenzied third act, her double life is exposed as the town descends into mayhem.
The way Daydream Nation is told follows Caroline's distracted mood swings. The narration has deliberate false starts, time-hopping flashbacks and a couple of out-of-body drug experiences. There are onscreen titles for disconnected episodes: a segment about the first girl (a student who moonlights as an erotic dancer) who is murdered by the serial killer, the misadventures of the local stoners' group, and a flashback to the death of Thurston's buddy in a car crash. There's a subplot that deals with Caroline's dad (Ted Whittall), glassily sarcastic and emotionally remote, as he gradually opens up to Thurston's warm and fluttery single mom (Andie MacDowell). Morbid sensitivity appears to be viral: On three different occasions, characters ask someone else how they think the world will end.
To a large degree, the film is a platform for Dennings ( Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), with her young-but-wise blend of vulnerability and take-charge brashness that make her an utterly plausible magnet for sensitive dudes. She also has a great screen face - the strong bone structure, almond-shaped eyes and full mouth suggest a sensual theatrical mask - though sometimes the language that comes out of her mouth seems improbable. Jokes about Atom Egoyan and Roman Polanski sound like screenwriter's lines, not the quips of a 17-year-old. Too often, you wish that Goldbach, or Caroline, would try a little less hard to impress, and in doing so, leave a deeper impression.
Daydream Nation
- Written and directed by Michael Goldbach
- Starring Kat Dennings, Josh Lucas and Reece Thompson
- Classification: 14A