When I saw this film’s premise – a poet, his musician friend and a waitress who all hang out at a bar where two of them work and the rocker plays – I cringed. More artsy, Gen-X angst, I thought. Well, yeah, but it’s actually pretty good, or at least not too awful, artsy Gen-X angst.
The poet receives a generous offer from a San Francisco poetry foundation to move there and have his poems published while the musician, on the verge of signing an elusive record deal, thrives on the edge of the law. But when the bar owner, conveniently the brother of a sadistic cop who’s riding the rocker’s a*s, attempts to rape the waitress, the musician’s girlfriend, the musician kills him. Thus primed for tragedy, the three friends struggle to escape the sticky fly-trap stomping grounds of their youth, avoid the cop’s violent revenge and maintain their strained and forever altered bond of friendship.
Again, not bad, but James Boyd’s semi-autobiographical slacker epic isn’t particularly innovative or compelling, either.
