Lily Rabe is excellent, more than capable of holding her own as a lead and nice understated comedic performance. She's not the problem with the film.
It definitely feels like the Directors first attempt at a feature, there's a fair amount of moments in here where you think "that could have been better". The semi-realist, wandering lens moments are particularly clumsily done and feel anachronistic - certainly could have been done in that style, it just seems as if the director had a "that'll do" attitude and a checklist of cultural beats to hit.
Which leads me to the soundtrack, trust-fund bands doing covers of songs that would be pertinent to the film if the originals were used, but they were - so you just get the sacharine "new" version with the rough edges sanded to a cookie-cutter banality. Particularly egregious was the opening track, the worst cover of "Pump it up" ever - not a great intro and put me in the mindset of instant dislike.
Again, Lily Rabe does all the heavy lifting here, this could have been an 8/10 film if the director did it again.
It definitely feels like the Directors first attempt at a feature, there's a fair amount of moments in here where you think "that could have been better". The semi-realist, wandering lens moments are particularly clumsily done and feel anachronistic - certainly could have been done in that style, it just seems as if the director had a "that'll do" attitude and a checklist of cultural beats to hit.
Which leads me to the soundtrack, trust-fund bands doing covers of songs that would be pertinent to the film if the originals were used, but they were - so you just get the sacharine "new" version with the rough edges sanded to a cookie-cutter banality. Particularly egregious was the opening track, the worst cover of "Pump it up" ever - not a great intro and put me in the mindset of instant dislike.
Again, Lily Rabe does all the heavy lifting here, this could have been an 8/10 film if the director did it again.