In Stereo has a good soul-inflected soundtrack with quality acts like The Budos Band and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. The film is, for the most part, well-photographed. The title font design is retro without being cliched. Male lead Micah Hauptman is a good actor with a strong presence and an expressive face. But the film’s virtues are wasted by a terrible script that conveys an unrealistic depiction of human relationships and an even more unrealistic vision of the New York art scene.
David (Hauptman) is a photographer living in a huge apartment with his girlfriend Jennifer (Melissa Bolona). When he sneaks a look at Jennifer’s phone and notices a suspicious text message, he follows her and finds out that she’s sleeping with another guy. David explains to his shrink (Sean Cullen) that his girlfriend is sleeping with his best friend Chris (Kieran Campion). For some reason, instead of breaking up with her immediately, David plays along, not letting on what he knows. In the meantime, he runs into his ex-girlfriend Brenda (Beau Garrett), a reasonably famous actress struggling to find decent roles.
None of these characters are appealing. David is an obnoxious bro, Jennifer is an airhead, Brenda is arrogant and Chris a wimp in Nick Cave’s wardrobe. It’s a wonder that Hauptman gets any traction from his character at all; he doesn’t have leading-man looks and he’s completely mismatched with the model-types cast as his girlfriends. The script doesn’t do him any favors either, but where the words fail to resemble that of an actual human being, his expressive face and presence gives his underwritten, douchey character something like a second dimension.
These unappealing characters are written into an artist’s fantasy of New York. David makes his living as a photographer and what we see of his work is in the tradition of street photography but it’s completely unengaging, nowhere near distinct enough to provide him the means to afford a huge New York apartment. An apartment that makes even the spacious apartment in “Friends” look like a broom closet. An absurdly humongous apartment that might be within in the reach of a photographer who worked in slick commercial modes that paid obscenely well. But unless there’s a trust fund photographer out there I’m not aware of, no aspiring street photographer could afford an apartment half the size of David’s lair.
Not only that, but David, whose work will be featured in a big gallery opening, decides the night before his show opens to sneak into the gallery and switch all the work on view with new, ahem, “better” work. If this were the real world, press releases and lists of work available would have been determined far in advance; if this were the real world, his supposedly edgy new work wouldn’t have a prayer of selling. Yet his agent suggests that this work is so good that he could pick any woman in the gallery and take them home and make them like it.
This is the first feature film for writer-director Mel Rodriguez III, who previously worked as an editor. His film is not without visual flair, its occasional split screens sometimes gimmicky, but in one instance, meaningful. Rodriguez gets a good performance out of Hauptman despite the weak material he has to work with. But what an awful script.
The film’s title suggests to David that his photography is inspired by music, but in a closing shot that may be the most (or only) convincing thing in the film, that title also suggests that relationships are two channels of the same record. In Stereo seems tailor-made for lovers of vinyl, New York and photography, but without believable characters or a good script, its intended audience will quickly find a better station to tune in.