Sometimes, throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks can be a valid artistic process, resulting in unexpected detours and rewarding leftfield turns. And sometimes you end up with How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Which, despite the very best intentions of John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Shortbus) and his talented and game cast, is a film that can never quite decide what it wants to be.
Is it a celebration of the golden age of punk, as the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee and the country’s youth flipped a collective middle finger? Is it a coming-of-age story about a sensitive soul who’s not quite got the heart for punk? Is it a sweet love story between two star-crossed lovers? Is it an utterly bonkers sci-fi comedy about aliens abroad at a time when they don’t seem all that weird? Is it a movie where Simon Amstell off of the telly turns up for a weirdly distracting cameo, and proceeds to utter not a single word?
It’s fully invested in exploring the weird, but not always the funny.
It’s all of these and, ultimately, none of them, eventually collapsing under the weight of trying on a dozen different guises. Based on the kernel of a plot contained within Neil Gaiman’s award-winning 2006 short story, How To Talk To Girls At Parties flits around from idea to idea, visual conceit to visual conceit, never really settling long enough to form a cohesive whole. At times, its (hopefully) deliberately slapdash approach recalls The Greasy Strangler, but this is a much more earnest proposition, even for a movie that has a mad throwdown between punk rockers, led by Nicole Kidman in a fright wig and a fright accent, and a group of weirdly dressed aliens who look like they’ve stumbled out of a bad art installation. No, scratch that — who look like they are a bad art installation. It’s fully invested in exploring the weird, but not always the funny.
The most successful strand is that romance between Alex Sharp’s Enn and the ever-excellent Elle Fanning as Zan, a naive visitor to this realm who seizes the chance to learn more about “the punk” and broaden her horizons over the course of two heady days. But Mitchell, directing his first feature since 2010’s *Rabbit Hole *and returning to the freneticism of Hedwig And The Angry Inch, then bounces off to another plot strand, and any spell cast is broken. There are other things to recommend — the seriously eye-catching costumes from the legendary Sandy Powell, for one — but often in isolation. After all, when you throw shit at a wall, more often than not you’re just left with a wall covered in shit.
