Harris Dickinson (NEON)
In her latest film, writer-director Eliza Hittman uses skin-deep imagery to explore the inner life of her haunted protagonist. Taking the coming of age film’s threadbare trappings, she probes deeper, fixing her penetrative lens upon the tragic masquerade of performative masculinity.
The follow-up to Hittman’s 2013 film It Felt Like Love, Beach Rats follows Frankie (Harris Dickinson), a young Brooklyn bro struggling with his father’s losing battle with cancer. Frankie’s daily routine consists of bumming around Coney Island with his delinquent friends, smoking weed, and snorting his dad’s crushed opioids for kicks. But first we see Frankie in his dimly lit basement bedroom, trawling gay chatrooms and settling on an interaction with a silver foxed older man. This little secret colors the stereotypical surface, providing new interpretations of Frankie’s laconic gaze in group situations or his awkward flirting with potential new love interest Simone (Madeline Weinstein.)
As his home life grows ever more depressing, Frankie life goes down two opposing roads. To keep up appearances and provide his mother with some comfort that he’s on the straight and narrow, he pursues a relationship with Simone, while keeping his friends in the dark by plying them with weed and pills they can’t seem to score on their own. But at night, he continues to frequent video chatrooms. It’s not long before he goes from the repeated refrain of “I don’t know what I like” and refusing to meet up with his admirers to having a very specific type that he picks up on the street and hooks up with in darkened parts of the beach.
There’s not much complexity in the straightforward plot, a breezy assemblage of scenes that hews a little too closely to the cloying Larry Clark influence of the visuals, but the undeniable sense of dread that his two lives will collide provides enough suspense to keep the film moving at a healthy pace. Although any number of indie films have explored this territory before, Beach Rats is best from moment to moment, hovering closely on Frankie in instances of conflict and stomach-churning discomfort. When he starts a casual discussion with Simone about whether she’s ever kissed a girl, she crudely reinforces the maxim that women making out is hot, but men doing it is just gross; at this judgement, Dickinson’s winces in pain.
Taken alone, some scenes seem little more than B-roll from a Jersey Shore spin-off, but when the camera closes in on Dickinson, his darting eyes and unsure mouth paint a more engaging portrait. Hittman holds on blushed flesh and hands caressing thighs and shoulder blades, juxtaposing Frankie’s attempts at intimacy with Simone against his exponentially more graceful dalliances with the daddies he meets on the side of the road. When Frankie and Simone huddle together in front of a full length mirror to take ass selfies for Instagram, it’s as painful to see him struggle to play the role of cute girl’s beau as it is to watch her ignore the red flags for her own slice of social media normalcy.
By the third act, it’s clear Hittman’s script isn’t building to a particularly profound or satisfying conclusion, and the film fizzles when it comes time to wrap things up. It’s a storytelling handicap that befalls a lot of low-budget fare in this segment, but the journey is more engrossing for Hélène Louvart’s powerful camera work and Dickinson’s promising performance. While Frankie doesn’t get much of a send-off, Dickinson’s best days as a leading man are still ahead of him.
Beach Rats
Written & Directed by Eliza Hittman
Starring Harris Dickinson, Kate Hodge, Erik Potempa, and Madeline Weinstein
Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language
95 Minutes
Opens today at Landmark’s E Street Cinema & Angelika Film Center Mosaic
