Taglines: One summer can change everything.
Daniel, an awkward teenager, is sent by his mother to spend the summer with his aunt on Cape Cod after the death of his father. He is not excited about it at first, but soon he meets Hunter Strawberry, the bad boy in town. While working at a convenience store, Hunter hurriedly asks Daniel to hide marijuana from approaching police officers. They later become business partners in selling drugs from a man named Dex.
Hunter’s younger sister McKayla is the most crushed-on girl on Cape Cod. After escaping from her boyfriend at the drive-in, McKayla asks Daniel to take her home. Although Hunter forbids him to see McKayla, Daniel cannot help himself. He and McKayla start dating, even though both the Strawberry siblings do not know it from each other.
Selling marijuana becomes very profitable, and Daniel and Hunter start to make a lot of money. Daniel wants to start selling cocaine without letting Dex know, but Dex finds out and wants Hunter to kill Daniel. Hunter tells Daniel to run and never come back, and when Dex finds Hunter, he kills him. McKayla sees her brother killed and flees town. According to the narrator, Daniel was never seen again.
Hot Summer Nights is a 2017 American crime drama film directed and written by Elijah Bynum, in his directorial debut. It stars Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe, Alex Roe, Maia Mitchell, William Fichtner and Thomas Jane. Set on Cape Cod in the summer of 1991, the plot follows a teenage boy who becomes entangled in the world of drugs. The film premiered at South by Southwest on March 13, 2017. It was released on June 28, 2018, through DirecTV Cinema, before receiving a limited release on July 27, 2018, by A24.
Film Review for Hot Summer Nights
There’s a scene in the 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis” in which the title character, a struggling folk singer in early-1960s New York, meets a younger musician who’s been making waves. This other guy is well organized, polite and an engaging performer who can easily get a coffeehouse audience to sing along with him. During one such show, a flabbergasted Llewyn asks his friend, who admires this fellow, “Does he have a higher function?”
That unkind question passed through my mind while I was watching “Hot Summer Nights,” written and directed by Elijah Bynum, who is making his feature debut. The movie opens during a hurricane, with a teenager named Daniel driving dangerously through the wind and rain in a snazzy sports car. Daniel, played by Timothée Chalamet (whose cachet is unlikely to be enhanced by the Shia LaBeouf riffs he reproduces here), is in trouble. After another car slams into his, the movie, set in the early 1990s, goes back several months, to the beginning of the summer.
At that time, Daniel, a city kid unnerved by the death of his father, is dispatched to Hyannis, Mass., by his even more unnerved mother. A colorful montage of various adolescents from different social strata establishes the beach town’s hierarchies. Neither a townie nor a rich-kid summer resident, the skinny but cocky Daniel takes notice of two fellow teenagers: the hunky drug dealer and local legend, Hunter (Alex Roe), and the preternaturally attractive tough girl, McKayla (Maika Monroe).
Daniel wants what Hunter has, which is a lot of cash to throw around. And he just plain wants McKayla. So does every other boy in town, says the movie’s unnamed narrator, who’s looking back from a distance of years but speaking as his teenage self. As a demonstration, he regales us with a scene in which a fellow grabs McKayla’s recently discarded chewing gum from the underside of the shelf below a public phone and unhesitatingly places it in his mouth.
Not a lot of people watch Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and ask why Linda, its young narrator, speaks as the kid she was during the times she’s recounting. It’s poetic license that’s been carefully applied for, and we accept it. With the trite “Hot Summer Nights,” not so much. Admittedly, a teenager describing McKayla in the drooling terms used here is ostensibly more forgivable and (arguably) less creepy than a grown man would be, uttering the same superlatives. But still, the episode and the movie’s attitude toward McKayla are ickily sexist.
As Daniel pursues his ambitions in romance and illegal commerce — complicated by Hunter’s being McKayla’s estranged brother, and still protective of her — the movie also nods to other directors. More accurately, it frantically waves to Wes Anderson (the camera work in the Hyannis social-whirl sequences) and to Paul Thomas Anderson (the drug-deal-gone-wrong sequence and the vintage Can song featured much more appropriately on the soundtrack of that director’s “Inherent Vice”). The influence of Joel and Ethan Coen, who made “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is also strong.
Perhaps this picture’s higher function is to be a calling card. But I don’t know what a calling-card project that demonstrates that its maker can semi-successfully mimic artistically vital but uncommercial directors is supposed to prove. For me, it mostly proved a waste of time.
Hot Summer Nights (2018)
Directed by: Elijah Bynum
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe, Alex Roe, Maia Mitchell, William Fichtner, Thomas Jane, Maia Mitchell, William Fichtner, Jeanine Serralles, Reece Ennis, Alexander Biglane
Screenplay by: Elijah Bynum
Production Design by: Kay Lee
Cinematography by: Javier Julia
Film Editing by: Jeff Castelluccio, Tom Costantino, Dan Zimmerman
Costume Design by: Carol Cutshall
Set Decoration by: Kim Leoleis
Art Direction by: Evan Maddalena
Music by: Will Bates
MPAA Rating: R for drug content and language throughout, sexual references, and some strong violence.
Distributed by: A24 Films
Release Date: July 27, 2018
Visits: 125
