Review: Hot Summer Nights

Hot Summer Nights, starring a pre-Call Me By Your Name Timothée Chalamet, takes place during a time when "people loved Jesus and macaroni salad, and they hung American flags above front doors that were never locked." One would be forgiven for thinking that this is the Fifties, given the white picket fence Americana look and feel bestowed upon the film by writer-director Elijah Bynum in his directorial debut, but the film takes place during one long, hot summer in 1991.

That year, as the unseen narrator (Shane Epstein Petrullo) reminds us, was the year that America went to war and Freddie Mercury died of AIDS. Yet neither of those events seem to have had much impact on Daniel Middleton (Chalamet), who is first seen meditating in his room in nothing but his underwear. Allegedly grieving over the death of his father, whose passing is nothing but a deus ex machina to have Daniel's mother send him to Cape Cod for the summer to stay with his aunt, the teenager finds himself adjusting to a town where he is neither a "townie," a local who live there year-round, nor a "Summer Bird," a tourist only in town for the season. It is a summer that will change his life and, though our narrator wonders if Daniel himself would know what prompted the change, it's clear that the catalysts are siblings Hunter and McKayla Strawberry.

Hunter (Alex Roe) is the local legend, a James Dean-type who remains cool in the 96-degree heat even when clad in a leather jacket and who is rumoured to have had an affair with the principal's wife, burned down an ice cream shop because they put sprinkles on his order, and supposedly killed a man. What is fact is that he sells dime bags to the Summer Birds, has an easily provoked temper, and that he will live and die in the same town in which he was born. His sister McKayla (Maika Monroe), from whom he is estranged, is considered the hottest fox around, salivated over by all of the boys to such an extent that one even killed himself after she broke up with him. Daniel finds himself in both their orbits, entering into the drug dealing business with Hunter and into a steamy affair with McKayla.

Both developments stretch the limits of plausibility but, then again, much of what happens in Hot Summer Nights is barely believable, at least not as a straight coming-of-age drama. Much of the film is ripe for a John Waters-type tongue-in-cheek campiness, especially in its overcooked portrayals of the Strawberry siblings, yet Bynum either lacks the confidence to work in that mode or he has a woefully misplaced faith in the strength and execution of his story. Bynum at least has the good sense to craft a soundtrack teeming with earworms from the Sixties and Eighties, but seems to believe that the songs will be enough to paper over the gaps in his storytelling. They do not, and neither do the actors, who try their best but are stranded in an aimless, disjointed, often boring, and cliché-ridden film.

Hot Summer Nights

Directed by: Elijah Bynum

Written by: Elijah Bynum

Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe, Thomas Jane, Alex Roe, Maia Mitchell, Emory Cohen, William Fichtner, Jack Kesy, Shane Epstein Petrullo