For a story that hinges on crooked cops, car chases, drug deals and deadly shootouts, First Date‘s most unexpected ingredient is its charm. How much abuse and danger will one boy endure in order to make a good impression on his girl-next-door crush, and how is she going to react once things really start to go off the rails? First-time filmmakers and writers Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp take this premise and push it a bit beyond the expected, veering back and forth between the tropes of romantic-comedies and noir thrillers while managing to find fresh angles on both.
Opening with a screwball tone that persists even when events get dark, the story finds Mike (Tyson Brown) mooning over a neighbor girl, Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), who clearly likes him but he’s too nervous to clock that. There’s an innocence to their fumbling flirtation that feels at once genuine and unlikely in the icky age of social media where everyone’s a curator of their own public image. Although the film is set in the cell phone-saturated present, the sweetness and naiveté of some of the characters feels sprung from a nostalgic take on pre-internet youth and romance. This mutes the sense of realism but adds to the escapist pleasure of following Mike’s adventures through a gauntlet of bad luck and dicey decisions where there’s never any sense that anyone is in real danger.
Badgered by his quip-cracking friend (Jake Howard) into asking Kelsey out, Mike is astonished when she accepts, expecting to be picked up at seven. Therein arises Mike’s dilemma: he doesn’t have a car. For a teenager in the suburb, this is a catastrophic turn of events, resulting in a farcical adventure where he absconds with a wad of cash to buy the first hunk of junk he can find rather than simply asking Kelsey if she’d be cool with riding bikes instead. The car he ends up acquiring from a shifty dude (Scott Noble) is a ‘60s-era Chrysler which barely runs but which comes with both a secret legacy and hidden contraband. Hijinks ensue.
The twin powerhouses of First Date are the nimbleness of the script, which keeps the story twisting in unexpected directions until the final act, and the freshness of the performances. Brown is perfectly cast as the put-upon protagonist who manages to navigate all the weirdos in his path–some harmless, some deadly–with graceful resilience. A pair of cops who take a curious interest in the car (Nicole Berry and Samuel Ademola) make for a deadpan comedy act, and the gang of bad guys, led by a preening sociopath (Jesse Janzen), are hilariously and scarily dysfunctional, seemingly as hostile to each other as to their intended victims. An elderly couple with a hankering to joy ride (Shari Schweigler and Graham Green) provide the wildcard along with a dash of sweetness.
The narrative surprises that begin accruing after the purchase of the clunker call to mind the twisty-turny inventiveness of the Coen brothers or Tarantino, grounded not in the accumulation of events but in the personalities of the rogues’ gallery of eccentric characters, each of whom possesses the potential to wrench the story in a new and unanticipated direction. And yet the film’s playfulness is punctured slightly by the intrusion of reality, when Mike is confronted by the police. For an African-American youth, being pulled over for a mysterious traffic stop has the potential to make a horror out of any story, and yet the scene is played without that edge. Perhaps Mike’s character was written without consideration of race, but not acknowledging the threat feels willfully naive.
Still, this is a movie that gleefully celebrates naiveté and nostalgia and the sense that both magical and terrible things can happen on a night full of yearning and romance. Buying a classic jalopy for $300 is about as unlikely as everything else that happens in the movie, but it’s a spark for young love and crazy adventure, and isn’t it nice to visit a world where such things are possible?
The post First Date appeared first on Spectrum Culture.