My first dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Michael John Warren’s Lolla: The Story Of Lollapalooza and Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions.

A REAL PAIN

dir. Jesse Eisenberg, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 89 minutes.

Back in 2022, Jesse Eisenberg’s dire directorial debut When You Finish Saving The World opened the Sundance Film Festival. It was barely released over a year later by A24 in that nominal way the buzzy distributor sometimes takes projects they’re no longer keen on back behind the barn like Old Yeller. A Real Pain is already being heralded as the young actor-auteur’s comeback, bought for an eye-popping $10 million by Searchlight and Hulu, presumably to draft off the recent Emmy win of Succession’s Kieran Culkin. He and Eisenberg star as semi-estranged cousins taking a Jewish history package tour of Poland following the death of their beloved grandmother. One cousin’s a buttoned up nebbish full of simmering resentments while the other is a charming Peter Pan-type prone to dramatic mood swings. (I’ll let you guess who plays who.) With a colorful assortment of characters along for the trip – ranging from a Rwandan genocide survivor to Jennifer Grey – the mismatched cousins’ cloying antics suggest something like Sideways except if they toured concentration camps instead of wineries. As in his first feature, Eisenberg earnestly, egregiously overwrites his characters’ fumbling attempts to reconcile their privileged, everyday unhappiness with the perspectives of the far less fortunate. Using the Holocaust to do so will strike you as either deeply profound or kinda gross.

LOLLA: THE STORY OF LOLLAPALOOZA

dir. Michael John Warren, Episodic, 89 minutes.

Because I don’t pay attention very well, I neglected to notice that this presentation was part of Sundance’s “Episodic” sidebar and what I had assumed to be a documentary was actually the first two episodes of an upcoming Paramount Plus miniseries produced by MTV. (I guess now everybody goes to film festivals to watch television.) Quite entertaining for what it is, Lolla’s a straightforward Behind The Music-style presentation making copious use of old MTV news clips and new talking head interviews to chronicle the progression of Perry Farrell’s traveling circus from underground experiment to commercial juggernaut. The past few years have been a transitional period in which the wheezy boomer rock docs that once served as tentpoles of festival programming are now targeted at my own generation, and in my increasing decrepitude I can’t deny the nostalgia high of watching Soundgarden cover “Cop Killer” or revisiting Farrell and Ice-T’s incendiary performance of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me N****r, Whitey.” Interestingly, these episodes received an explicit content warning that required age verification on Sundance’s online viewing app, presumably because of Rage Against The Machine’s full-frontal anti-PMRC protest. Still, I found it curious that during that Sly Stone song, the n-word is bleeped during Perry Farrell’s verses, but not when Ice-T sings it. I’d love to read the internal memos behind that decision.

STRESS POSITIONS

dir. Theda Hammel, U.S. Dramatic Competition, 95 minutes.

Maybe I’m just not ready yet for the wacky Covid period pieces. Writer-director Theda Hammel’s overcaffeinated farce takes place during the summer of 2020, following a cadre of chaotic Brooklyn artist types and hangers-on as they try to negotiate life during lockdown. John Early stars as Terry Goon, a shrieking, overprotective uncle whose sugar daddy husband just filed for divorce. Terry’s 20-year-old, half-Moroccan nephew is staying in the basement, much to the fascination of his sketchy best friend Karla (the filmmaker herself, who steals the movie) and assorted other oddballs who all try to socialize while social distancing. Hammel does some intriguing things with voice-over, blending the POVs of two increasingly unreliable narrators while folding flashbacks into evocative overlaps. But I found the film’s sense of humor excruciating, relying on screeching pratfalls and a sweaty, charmless lead performance from Early. His character is a chore to be around, and Stress Positions improves considerably in his absence. I much preferred Hammel’s deadpan dysfunction as Karla, passive-aggressively wreaking havoc without seeming to register anything outside her own immediate self-interest. The movie’s funniest scene finds all these flag-burning, self-styled radicals spouting off about current events while having no idea which countries constitute the Middle East, but even that note gets pretty old when it’s pounded on this hard.