Sundance review: Punk-fueled comedy 'Dinner in America' starts sour but ends up sweet

‘Dinner in America’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, 11:59 p.m., Broadway 6 (Salt Lake City); Sunday, Jan. 26, 8:30 a.m., Prospector (Park City); Friday, Jan, 31, 3:30 p.m., Eccles (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City).

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Possibly the most punk-rock musical romance since “Sid & Nancy,” but with a happier ending (really, could there be a sadder one?), writer-director-editor Adam Carter Rehmeier’s “Dinner in America” is a middle finger to suburbia, conformity, and anyone who only watches the first 15 minutes.

I haven’t seen a movie work so hard to make me hate its protagonist in the opening scenes than this one. We meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) drooling into his lunch, thanks to the pharmaceuticals he’s taking as a test subject. He gets kicked out of the trial the same time as Beth (Hannah Marks), another drooler, and she invites him to her place for Sunday dinner — where chaos ensues involving Beth’s amorous mom (Lea Thompson), a projectile turkey, and Simon’s penchant for arson.

Having firmly established Simon as a self-destructive jerk, Rehmeier moves on to the other side of this story, a socially awkward young woman named Patty (Emily Skeggs). Patty works a menial job in a pet store, shoots baskets alone in her driveway, and sends Polaroids of herself masturbating to the masked punk-rock singer John Q. Public. When Patty meets Simon, when she helps him elude the Detroit cops, her first request is that he take her to see John Q.’s band, Psyops — something Simon has a lot of trouble with, for reasons Rehmeier eventually reveals.

Simon’s presence also changes the dynamic in Patty’s family, with high-strung little brother Kevin (Griffin Gluck) and her strait-laced parents (Pat Healy and Mary Jane Rajskub) causing Patty much stress. Then there are the obnoxious track athletes who tease Patty on the bus, who soon feel Simon’s wrath.

There’s a gleeful anarchy alive in “Dinner in America,” and Rehmeier is the sort whose goals are humor first and narrative coherence second, maybe third. That’s tough to swallow in the movie’s frantic early passages, but when the movie settles into the dynamic of aggro Simon and oddball Patty, it’s a solid story with a surprisingly sweet center.