Dinner in America – Film Review

“Hey, did you turn the cricket’s up?”

Simon (Kyle Gallner) isn’t a conventional person. He doesn’t have a job per se but he is willing to put his body through drug testing in order to make a few bucks. After ditching one test, he follows Beth (Hannah Marks) home for dinner and maybe a blowjob. Beth’s family is pretty typical – dad would rather be watching football with his son and mom wants to lose herself in the bottom of a bottle of wine, and get laid. After getting busted for being too generous with his hostess and setting the lawn on fire, Simon is out on the run.

After evading the cops he meets Patty (Emily Skeggs), a young woman who still lives at home with her family and just lost her job cleaning cages at a pet store. She’s full of rage and sexual repression and all she wants is to go to a punk show to hear the only music that makes her feel normal. Together she and Simon embark on a string of fearless escapades that bring them closer together as a more put together Sid & Nancy type couple that could benefit from anger management treatment and a few rounds of toe curlin’.

This is a brash, brutal film about how everyone is fucked up and sometimes we should look around and scream as loud as we can into the void. The jocks are rude and obnoxious and think they’re better than everyone. Nihilism can get you through the darkest times and no one will thinks twice because they have their own problems to worry about.

Writer/director Adam Rehmeier paints a deeply tragic and brutally honest portrayal of how fucked up people are in this country. Everyone is in it for themselves, but if you’re lucky you can find someone just a demented as you are. Kyle & Emily take this Bonnie & Clyde on acid duo and make you root for them from the first frame to get everything that they deserve from life, hoping that the bridges they burn will blow up in the faces of their oppressors while they laugh manically as they are hauled off to the looney bin for observation.

Reviewed online, June 16, 2022. Running time: 106 min.

PRODUCTION: An Atlas Industries, Bee-Hive Productions, PSH Collective, Red Hour Films production. Producers: John Covert, David Hunter, Ross Putman, Sam Slater, Ben Stiller, Nicholas Weinstock. Executive producers: Bull Blumenthal, Stephen Braun, Scott Carmel, Eric B. Fleischman, Jorge Garcia Castro, Karl Herrmann, Robert Kravis, Brandon Lichtenstein, Hannah Marks, Duncan Montgomery, Sean King O’Grady, Haroon Saleem, Kerem Sanga, Jack Selby, Bill Stertz.

CREW: Director/screenplay/editor: Adam Rehmeier. Cinematography: Jean-Philippe Bernier. Music: John Swihart.

CAST: Kyle Gallner, Emily Skeggs, Griffin Gluck, Pat Healy, Sidi Henderson, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Sean Rogers, Lea Thompson, David Yow, Nick Chinlund.