When a young cartoonist from New Jersey dreams of counter-culture and sinks into misery.
Since the glory days of Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes), rarely have we seen on the big screen such an assembly of nerdof geek, misfits, and especially antiheroes with distressing banality. It would probably not be so obvious if the characters of Funny Pages, the very first feature from young Owen Kline (yes, Kevin Kline’s son), weren’t wandering around the grimmest corners of New Jersey. In this movie, and arguably in real life, failing in a neighborhood like Trenton is tantamount to failing altogether.
Between pimply teenagers and libidinous old people, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri, worthy successor to Michael Cera) tries to clear a path, but not the one traced in advance by his parents, which would oblige him to continue his studies.
Fond of comic books, especially the most corrosive – he is past the age of the adventures of Archie and those made by Disney – he would dream of being part of this universe to redraw its contours. It is the hope that one of his teachers, Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis), holds out to him, ready to undress without embarrassment or modesty so that Robert can paint his portrait. The situation, absurd, ends in a tragic way, and pushes the boy in an unexpected direction.
For the justice system
Conflicts with the law will lead him simply to work… for the justice system. Thanks to Cheryl (Marcia DeBonis), who was able to plead her case well before an expeditious judge. It is also the moment when the teenager decides to leave his comfortable environment, direction Trenton, to live in a dark, hideous, overheated apartment, which he shares with two fanatics who seem to have come out of the imagination of cartoonist Robert Crumb.
At his job, when he discovers that Wallace (Matthew Maher, a madness that never seems feigned), a client of Cheryl, has already worked in a prestigious comic book house, he sees there a sign of fate. However, the poor man also seems to have come out of a nightmarish world, almost always impulsive, violent, a bit manipulative. The boy wanted to make him his mentor; rather, he will become his own worst enemy.
Funny Pages evokes several graphic and cinematographic universes, and Owen Kline greedily appropriates them, coating them with nostalgia, filming in 16 mm to better approximate the aesthetics of American independent filmmakers of the 1990s – a period that is completely bygone.
By choosing to compose with winter light, in windowless basements, and neon-lit shops, Kline accentuates the pale and desperate face of his characters. Badly combed, badly shaved, bulging eyes, faces covered in sweat or surprised in sometimes humiliating positions, they form a gallery of idlers that the filmmaker forces us to look straight in the eye.
If the film testifies to the fierce desire of a young filmmaker to lug his camera around the darkest corners of an unequal and schizophrenic society, the demonstration testifies to a process of maturity far from being completed.
Wanting to chain provocations, to stretch certain situations to distill only a great uneasiness, Owen Kline performs pastiches of universes and aesthetic approaches that sometimes suffer from comparison.
It’s no wonder that brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, directors (Good Time, Uncut Gems) and producers, have recognized in Owen Kline a not so distant cousin, enlightening the losers of the greater New York area with the same cruelty and with the same ruthless gaze. Funny Pages represents the first page, the first chapter, of a work still to be written and drawn.