Dinner in America is a pleasant, colorful alternative to smooth, safe romkoms

Family meals at the large table in the living room: a bourgeois scene that has a rich tradition in American film. It offers filmmakers a convenient and effective setting to sketch the relationship between the dinner companions, in which their altercations often lead to strong emotional outbursts and prematurely interrupted main courses. The Quirky Romantic Comedy Dinner in America yields no fewer than three variations on that familiar recipe, including flying meat, chairs thrown through the window and lit up flower beds.

The hub of all the consternation is the pyromaniac rocker Simon (Kyle Gallner), who quickly makes a mess after a failed drug habit. While the police are after him, he happens to meet pet store employee Patty (Emily Skeggs), an introverted but basically just as maladjusted twenty-something who still lives with her parents. In her bedroom, Patty likes to go crazy to the music of punk band PSYOPS, after which she makes Polaroids while masturbating and sends them, along with horny love poems, to the masked band leader John Q. Public. Simon goes into hiding with her and soon realizes what ironic games providence is playing with them: after all, he himself is the John Q. Public so coveted by Patty.

This all probably sounds pretty bland and nonsensical. At first you can easily wonder what filmmaker Adam Rehmeier actually has in mind with Dinner in Americawhich is released by film museum Eye as part of the summer series Previously Unreleased. Seemingly unconcerned about anything, the film swings from a recalcitrant middle-class cartoon to a gaudy wacky romance such as you often see in independent American cinema, and then also a sort of just-not-Bonnie-and-Clyde. to be an adventure. One moment it feels like a direct descendant of Ghost World (2001), the other looks like two crazy guys who Natural Born Killers (1994) want to imitate but don’t really succeed.

What Dinner in America sympathetic and at times irresistible is that it pops and crackles between the two main characters and their interpreters, convincingly bringing out the gentle in Simon and the explosive in Patty. Even their most adolescent adventures thus ultimately contribute to the absurdist, but genuine charm of the whole. Thus, Dinner in America nevertheless a pleasant, colorful alternative to the smooth, safe romkoms that the film audience is usually served.