Review: Hot Summer Nights

Image courtesy of A24.

Elijah Bynum's debut, "Hot Summer Nights," has a great soundtrack and features some of filmdom's rising stars - Timothee Chalamet and Maika Monroe - but while its director clearly wants it to act as a calling card for his talents, they are mostly wasted by riffing on better films, namely the work of Martin Scorsese and early Paul Thomas Anderson films.

As the film opens, Danny (Chalamet) is grieving his father's death, so his mother decides to ship him off to live with an aunt on Cape Cod for the summer of 1991. For a movie about a youth going off to live with a relative, that relative is scarce to the point of nonexistent. Once on the cape, Danny - for no particular reason - strikes up a friendship with the local drug dealer, Hunter (Alex Roe) and, for the sake of this film's existence, decides to start selling marijuana himself. It doesn't hurt that he first meets Hunter's sister, McKayla (Monroe), and quickly becomes smitten.

The film is narrated, quite strangely I might add, by some random kid on the cape who seemingly witnessed the film's events, although we never actually see him until the end. In other films, "The Virgin Suicides" for example, an elusive narrator can work - but here, the fact that this kid narrates the story is more than likely because if an adult had narrated it - and commented on how the local boys liked to masturbate while thinking of McKayla - it would have been, well, ickier.

From the moment we meet McKayla to the film's ending when she runs off to who knows where, she is - to dredge up an old movie trope - an object of the male gaze. In other words, she's there to attract Danny and help him to find himself, or something of that nature. But she's not the Pixie Dream Girl of other male fantasy movies, but rather the Hot Girl Who's More Soulful Than She Lets On.

I know, I'm being a bit snarky about "Hot Summer Nights," which is occasionally entertaining, albeit overly familiar, as it hits all the beats of a film of this type: boy meets girl, boy meets boy, boys begin selling drugs, boys get in over their heads, and then... drama! Chalamet is saddled with a character whose motivations are questionable, most likely because the kid narrating his story doesn't actually know him. Regardless, the actor - who was great in "Call Me By Your Name" and a convincing little shit in "Lady Bird" - does his best with the material provided.

But as I'd mentioned: you've seen all this before, from the camerawork reminiscent of shots you've seen in "Goodfellas" to the scene with a creepy drug dealer that feels straight out of "Boogie Nights." And the final bit of narration regarding the fate of one of the characters appears to have been inspired by "The Virgin Suicides." So, while "Hot Summer Nights" has its moments, a majority of those moments feel as if they were pulled straight out of previous movies that were more original than this one.