Another week, another glacial outing from the ever-expanding Coppola clan depicting the oh so beautiful emptiness of American teenage wildlife. Based on a collection of short stories by James Franco, who plays a creepy-cool lecherous sports teacher, this debut feature from Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sofia) noodles listlessly from one doped-out party to the next, its pretty vacant characters falling in and out of one another’s arms, cars and pools with studied disaffection. Emma Roberts presents a finely honed portrait of uneasy adolescence as the film’s awkward heroine, but otherwise they’re an unlikable and frequently uninteresting lot – it’s hard to care when drowning seems to threaten one wastrel, but his inevitable Gen X end is altogether more vainglorious. Lacking the exploitative edge of Harmony Korine or Larry Clark, or the sympathetic insight of Sofia Coppola, this settles for middle-of-the-road woozy melancholia – efficiently convincing yet insufficiently intriguing. Val Kilmer (whose son Jack stars) turns up wearing a headscarf and sucking a bong – which seems entirely appropriate.
