Watching Ryan Gosling’s feature debut as writer-director is like getting an over-rich but also somehow flavourless stew plonked down in front of you by the preening winner of Celebrity Masterchef.
It had its premiere at last year’s Cannes and now gets a UK release with 10 minutes shaved off the running time. No big scenes have been cut but some of the ambient establishing sequences have been trimmed and Matt Smith’s part has been reduced.
It’s still a fantastically annoying film: derivative, conceited and shallow, dependent dramatically on fatuous, consequence-free violence. But I still have to concede that there are flashes of mad energy.
An improbably glamorous Christina Hendricks lives in the ruins of suburban Detroit, with one infant and a teenage son who goes around scavenging for scrap metal, thus infuriating a local psycho gangster played by Matt Smith. To keep up the payments on their rickety old house, Hendricks agrees to perform at a creepy and entirely ridiculous nightclub specialising in horror-porn cabaret, set up by her bank manager, Ben Mendelsohn.
David Lynch might have made something of this, or David Gordon Green or even Terrence Malick. The difference is that Ryan Gosling has nothing much to communicate other than his own importance. But it hangs together, and Gosling might yet become an interesting film-maker.
