Timothée Chalamet Makes the Overwrought Hot Summer Nights Worthwhile
Itll be a sad day for Hollywood when Timothée Chalamet, star of the hazy new crime drama Hot Summer ..
Itll be a sad day for Hollywood when Timothée Chalamet, star of the hazy new crime drama Hot Summer Nights, is too old for us to keep coming of age vicariously in his image. Chalamet is our current moments lanky, pretty, lonely boy avatar of youth—a tough gig, in that its predicated on a quality that cannot last.
By all accounts, Chalamets making the best of it. The worthwhile thing about Hot Summer Nights—which was filmed before either of Chalamets 2017 breakouts, Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, though it only hits theaters Friday—is that its decisive proof of what a natural he is. For now, Chalamet will always be able to sell a role in which his shoulders are slumped, his hands take up permanent residence in his pockets, his hair is in his face with a mopey swoop—to sell us on characters whose personalities are as sensitive and susceptible as an open wound. In Hot Summer Nights, he gives us more of the same, and then some, but with the advantage of playing a character whos way in over his head—we get to see him damned by his own confidence. The movie, overall, isnt great. But his performance makes it worthy.
Chalamet plays a teenager named Daniel, whose father, a rugged all-American dad type, has just died, and whose mother, confounded by her sons moody self-isolation, has sent the boy to live with his aunt in Cape Cod. “Sending me away for the summer,” says Daniel, to his mother. “What a cliché.” So is that line, but never mind: Hot Summer Nights is not above cliché and tends, at times to its credit, to embrace that fact head-on.
Consider the premise: coming of age in Cape Cod, in 1991—which the movies teenage narrator notes is the hottest summer in 68 years, and which someone born before the 90s might remember was the summer of Hurricane Bob—and making teenage mistakes, facing the consequences of having ones life changed, and moving on, having now been schooled on the murky, brutal facts of life. Your typical coming-of-age stuff. You get the usual tensions. Theres the “summer birds”—the Polod and cardiganed richie rich types who only live here for three months out of the year—and the townies, who are, of course, practically invisible to the summer birds.
Theres all the grand mythology of youth, too, the stuff that makes works like Stand by Me, The Virgin Suicides, and even Stephen Kings It so irresistibly nostalgic. To hear the narrator tell it, Cape Cod is a peninsula beset with awkward tragedies of the month—a lovelorn teen suicide here, a drowning there, any number of other violent mishaps destined to become local myth. In the hands of debut writer-director Elijah Bynum, its all pleasurably larger-than-life. The movies got a token bad boy, for example, named Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe)—a muscular, grease-streaked, bona fide townie who sleeps with summer birds and sells weed from behind the checkout counter at the local gas station, where he works. Theres a rumor hes killed a guy. His sister, McKayla (Maika Monroe, of It Follows), is a legend in her own right: shes so hot that after she discards a wad of gum, we see a younger teen boy eat it.
All this is effective insofar as it makes everything that happens between these people feel like another local legend in the making. The movies conversationally hazy style, its lust for summer memories unspooling in slow motion is what makes it fun to watch, at times—even as the story wears thin. Daniel, too big for his britches, gets into the weed-selling business with Hunter; hilarity ensues. He also makes moves on McKayla, whos estranged from her brother for pretty good reasons. Hunter, meanwhile, falls for a girl—who happens to be the local sergeants daughter.
Its all just a setup, really, for a great group of young actors—Chalamet, in particular—to flex their relatability muscles, filling in archetypes with nuance and color. Monroe lives up to the height of McKaylas reputation, working the camera with alert but effortless care, and giving the young woman she plays—whos ultimately looking for a way out—a believable soul. Roe, too, is strong, a sensitive jock-type, a townie whose station is to be underestimated by people with more privilege. And then theres Chalamet, playing a kid whos not cool but who wants to be, whose overconfidence both gets him into trouble and somehow makes him seem more vulnerable; its always clear to us that hes getting in over his head, and that he is blissfully unaware of this fact. Chalamets sensitivity in the role is something special.
A few things take the wind out of the movies sails: its brash, persistent, occasionally distractingly anachronistic music cues; the overall sense that the story here doesnt quite deserve its epic framing. This is never more obvious than in the last act, when the hurricane shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, and gives the movie a chance to fashion itself a grand, tragic, and ostensibly mythic, ending—one it doesnt earn. The characters arent fleshed-out or material enough, real enough in their actions and desires, for any of this to feel larger than it is. But not for the casts lack of trying—especially Chalamet.
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