Timothée Chalamet plays another teenager entering the forbidden zone: a pot dealer who's daring beyond his years — and beyond all plausibility.
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Imagine a wistful hooking-up-on-the-boardwalk coming-of-age film, set on Cape Cod during the long hot summer of 1991, starring Timothée Chamalet in a variation on the passively precocious owl-eyed dreamer he played in “Call Me by Your Name.” Now imagine a scuzzy underworld drama that takes that same Chalamet character, in all his hooded sensual innocence, and turns him into a pot-dealing version of Mark Wahlberg in “Boogie Nights”: a cold hard opportunist who gets hooked on the life.
Put them together & you have “Hot Summer Nights,” a weirdly “romantic” drug drama that wastes no time burning plausibility to lớn the ground. Yet even when it does, the actors keep it alive (sort of). Still, you can’t stop wondering if the first-time writer-director, Elijah Bynum, who has a talent for atmosphere, meant for us to actually take the story on the level. If so, it was a miscalculation. He has made what feels like a “Miami Vice” episode ripped out of some sensitive and nostalgic teen dude’s diary.
Chalamet’s Daniel Middleton starts off as an awkward, alienated, asthmatic loner who sits around in his bedroom drinking in the forlorn strains of Linda Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time.” He is sent off lớn spend the summer with his aunt in Hyannis, where he’s an odd boy out, caught between the townies & a village of slumming tourists. But then he meets the two most beautiful people in town: Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe), a pot dealer in a red Mustang who swaggers into a buổi tiệc nhỏ looking like a brooding grease-monkey version of James Dean; và Hunter’s estranged sister, McKayla (Maika Monroe), who with her cutoffs và come-hither pout is the most coveted girl around. It’s Daniel’s destiny lớn win & betray both of them.
All of which might be more believable if the film didn’t present Daniel, in the early scenes, as a geek who doesn’t know how to lớn talk to girls và can barely hold onto his beer cup. That said, Chalamet makes geekery captivating. When he meets Hunter, a loser-stud who fell into the pot-salesman game và now can’t imagine doing anything else, he charms him with his quick brain & becomes his assistant.
That you can buy.
What we can’t buy is Daniel’s overnight transformation into a hustler who insists on taking Hunter’s business khổng lồ the next level. “Hot Summer Nights” was shot just before “Call Me by Your Name,” and it spent some time on the fabled đen List of ostensibly hot unproduced screenplays. Yet the joke of the movie is that a first-rate script is exactly what it doesn’t have. Bynum has made a half-baked, beyond-the-law “Adventureland” that keeps cutting corners, and never begins khổng lồ explain how Daniel could have the moxie, the contacts, and the underworld acumen khổng lồ transition from being a pot dealer’s wide-eyed beanpole lackey, hawking dime bags to tourists và locals, lớn becoming a sharp-edged drug salesman moving hàng hóa in bulk form.
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Yet Chalamet is such a good actor that he demonstrates how, in a movie that did explain it, you might buy him as a flyweight criminal opportunist. Chalamet has dark eyes và eyebrows that dance in his pale thin face, focusing his intensity, but more than that he has a quality of heartlessness that will take him far. I don’t mean that he doesn’t possess heart — only that he has the ability to lớn be magnetically self-directed and even cruel, which is an element of what any true star needs. (He drew on those qualities in “Lady Bird.”) When he’s in broken-geek mode, it’s hard khổng lồ believe that someone lượt thích McKayla would waste a second glance on him, but Chalamet gives Daniel the fumbling sexiness & surly instinct to lớn break through her defenses.
They spend a lãng mạn summer together, even as Daniel, in his other life, is making serious drug money. But here, once again, comes the schlock factor: The movie depicts Hyannis as the sort of small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business — but somehow, despite the youth-gossip grapevine, we’re supposed to accept that Hunter, with his street smarts, và McKayla, the most plugged-in girl around, could spend the entire summer without knowing that Daniel is involved with either of them.
Hunter, at a house buổi tiệc nhỏ in Boston, pistol-whips a drug salesman to lớn within an inch of his life, & we think, “What’s he going to vì chưng to Daniel when he learns his sister is sleeping with him?” The film sets up this old-style sexual conflict only to lớn let it wither away. Yet Alex Roe gives an expert performance as the doomed Hunter; he’stense, poised, suffused with a bad-boy awareness that his life of dealing can only crash & burn. He comes closer than anyone in the film to lớn creating an organically believable character.
There’s not much early-’90s atmosphere in “Hot Summer Nights,” apart from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” playing at the local drive-in. Bynum stages a good scene with a cocaine dealer, played by the always inventive William Fichtner, that exposes the film’s “Boogie Nights” pretensions. He also stages a lot of moonlit canoodling between Daniel và McKayla that’s meant khổng lồ tug at our hearts, though the film loses its pulse in these scenes. Maybe that’s because McKayla is more a male dream than a fully fledged character. Like the rest of “Hot Summer Nights,” she’s a fantasy pretending to lớn be real.
