Adam Rehmeier: "Dinner in America is salty and abrasive on the outside, but inside it’s sweet. It subversively frames something ugly, but underneath it all, these two characters exemplify the good in people, as twisted as that can be at times, especially with Simon."
A troubled punk singer and his biggest fan get into a series of scrapes in indie dramedy "Dinner in America". Adam Rehmeier’s rebel yell of a movie is as if Valley Girl was accidentally shunted into a teleportation machine alongside Sid & Nancy and the whole soupy stew beamed into the 90s. It’s about an angry punk singer with a pyromania fetish and a lonely and nerdy young woman with ADHD who is his biggest fan. Kyle Gallner plays John Q Public (real name: Simon), the lead singer of a band called Psy Ops who performs anonymously in a balaclava; off-stage, he has a vocal-fry badass voice, like Ray Liotta in GoodFellas. Simon is experiencing furious musical differences with the rest of the band and is making money through selling weed and taking part in big pharma medical experiments. Emily Skeggs is excellent as quirky, dreamy Patty, who takes indistinct Polaroids of herself masturbating to his music and sends them to him via the mailbox address on the band’s flyers. Dinner in America is a hyper aggressive comedy that deep down has a huge heart that will break down the walls built up by the characters. Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Todd Solondz’s Happiness were at opposite ends of the spectrum of difficult weirdness for this kind of material, Solondz setting a gold standard for strangeness, dysfunction and discomfort. Rehmeier is at the American Beauty end of things. His film has its own truculent charm. Source: theguardian.com
Instant cult classic Dinner In America delivers darkly hilarious punk rock romcom thrills: As fate has it, Patty is Simon’s number one fan, though she doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know it either, not at first. The film's first 15 minutes may be a bumpy ride for some audiences as it focuses entirely on Simon and his zero-tolerance attitude to life: definitely an 'acquired taste' in character terms. However, this less-than-palatable introduction is critical to the film's success – and those who stick with Dinner In America will be rewarded by nuanced pitch-perfect performances from Gallner and Skeggs, whose tangible off-the-wall chemistry make this instant cult classic work. Patty's self-confidence grows as she witnesses Simon's brash bulldozing of school bullies, sexual harassers, amusingly passive aggressive parents/siblings and other everyday obstacles, helping her to realise that it's possible to stand up for yourself (and, indeed, re-invent yourself) while going against the grain. Source: irishnews.com
When we first meet Simon, he comes off as an irredeemable douchebag, and his quips and misadventures feel distinctly mean-spirited. Patty, meanwhile, can initially be read as a loose assemblage of Napoleon Dynamite-isms, or worse, an ableist stereotype (while it’s never stated outright, it’s generally implied that Patty has an unspecified learning disability or spectrum diagnosis). Indeed, the first act is strong medicine, and I can imagine more timid viewers bailing rather than opting to hang with these characters. As Patty, Skeggs is a ray of sunshine, a genuinely good person with just enough wry savvy that her ultimate romance doesn’t feel like a total mismatch. Gallner, meanwhile, carries himself with such snotty charisma that you find yourself liking him in spite of yourself.
What’s more, despite their opposing acting styles, the two actors have fantastic chemistry, deftly bouncing off each other through scene after scene of witty repartee. Dinner in America is so raucous and hyperactive that, by the time its characters finally fall for each other, you don’t realize how hard you’re rooting for them. On the surface, this is not a subtle movie, but the transition from punk rock anarchy to swooning romanticism is real enough and felt enough that it sneaks up on you. By the end of the film, Patty has allowed Simon to drop some of his fuck-you defenses, and Simon has encouraged Patty to grow into her confidence and creative talents. Gallner is stunning in the role, crafting the image of a rebellious enfant terrible with a heart of gold. At the same time, Skeggs’s assertive eccentricity lends itself incredulously well to a film where everybody is trying to out weird each other. It’s a bit of a stretch to say this is some kind of subversive manic pixie dream girl narrative, yet there’s a strong sense of parity and mutual delirium between the two leads that makes their malady infectious.
Love and punk rock may seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re far from mutually exclusive. By the end of the film, these are the same smartasses you’ve come to love; they’ve just opened up their hearts a little bit more. It’s something of a cliche to refer to a film as a “romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies,” but in this case the description holds water. We’ll probably never hear Hugh Grant say “Take off that cat-shit-covered apron and I might be able to get hard,” and we’ll probably never see Julia Roberts furiously masturbate while blasting a dubbed cassette of hardcore b-sides, but as the movie unfolds, the emotions it evokes are the same. I had an honest-to-god lump in my throat as Patty crooned “Fuck ‘em all but us” over Simon’s sludgy guitar, and if that means I’ve gone soft in my old age, I don’t care. Dinner in America has a big, gushy heart beating under its crust-punk exterior, and it’s one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. Source: bostonhassle.com
Those who identified with the girl geeks of Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse may also find something to love in Emily Skeggs’s Patty, a wide-eyed suburban nerd whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of Simon (Kyle Gallner), a punk rock runaway. A throwback to the brightly coloured offbeat teen movies of the 90s and a rude riposte to that era’s more mainstream offerings (She’s All That’s sexist makeover scene is subverted), this sweet (odd) romcom is buoyed up by the chemistry between its leads. Once Simon meets Patty his world begins to change as he finally meets his match. As Simon starts to mellow, the tone also morphs and becomes something beautifully quirky and uniquely original.
It’s almost a punk Bonnie and Clyde. Dinner in America is an assault to the senses that really captures the attitude of punk-rock whilst at the same time crafting a quirky tale of love and self-empowerment. A joyously dark-hearted journey through suburban America that taps into the magic of films like Heathers, injects them with the spirit of punk rock and creates an instant hit that has the potential to shape a generation. Rehmeier doesn’t make explicit exactly what it is about America that Simon wishes to defy, but by the time he breaks bread with the William Sonoma family, viewers will get the idea. Suffice to say that young men like Simon grow up soaking in choiceless dissatisfaction, and they come of age renouncing their choicelessness. Partly it’s a class thing. Dinner in America doesn’t really cast America’s heartland in the most positive light. The film maintains traces of affection for the Mid-West regions mostly through the empathy felt for Simon and Patty, two loners in need of companionship who slowly become better people by being with each other.
Grant that “better” involves, among other things, a truly gnarly revenge prank on the two asshole jocks who make a hobby of sexually harassing Patty, and causing a scene at the local pet store where she used to work in an effort at securing her final paycheck from her stingy boss. “Better” is a relative term, and given the suffocating atmosphere of their hometown, where individuality is choked out of people and replaced by droning normalcy, the strong desire to revolt feels like a moral imperative. Rehmeier litters Dinner in America with hideous examples of what “normalcy” looks like, from the asshole jocks to the racist football dad. By the time the movie ends, Simon and Patty look like heroes in spite of their abrasive rudeness and reckless actions. Source: www.pastemagazine.com
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