It’s a movie about a flawed protagonist who’s depressed, has a messy and complicated romantic life, some foundational trauma in their past, carries a guitar around with them but isn’t very successful as a musician, and struggles to care for a runaway pet with an obvious metaphorical function to the plot. There’s a plot point about other characters questioning that pet’s gender.
That description describes one of my favorite movies of the last 15 years, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, and it also applies to Cora Bora, a new indie film. It’s just changed almost every other detail—the protagonist is a woman, it’s set on the present-day West Coast rather than 1960s-Greenwich Village, and the pet/metaphor is a dog rather than a cat. The cinematography is sunnier, while the plot is more steeped in 21st-century sexual mores than the scandalous cheating and abortions left in Llewyn’s wake.
Also, Cora Bora will never be remembered as a modern classic, but it has its moments, mostly thanks to star Megan Stalter. It’s a movie that debuted at South by Southwest and feels like one that did. There’s a lot of bad humor here, but the star keeps it bearable. Stalter is an actress and comedian who got her start in the viral video world. She plays a small but scene-stealing role on the HBO comedy series Hacks as Kayla, an extremely incompetent Hollywood assistant.
In Cora Bora, she plays Cora, a 30-ish woman trying but mostly failing to make it as a singer-songwriter in L.A. She has a girlfriend (Jonica T. Gibbs) back in her hometown of Portland, although she frequently points out that they’re in an open relationship and she sleeps with men as well. Most of the characters here are bisexual, in open relationships, polyamorous, or part of other nontraditional entanglements, all of which the film treats matter-of-factly.
Cora returns to Oregon to surprise her girlfriend, only to discover she’s living with another woman (Ayden Mayeri). And then, in shades of “Llewyn is the cat,” this struggling adult is tasked with caring for a dog but loses that dog repeatedly. The film takes its audience’s faith that they’ll stick with a protagonist who messes up her life in increasingly uncomfortable ways. We get the sense that a revelation is coming about something very bad that happened in the past, and when it arrives, it contextualizes everything. There’s probably no way around it, but this is one of those comedies where most of the laughs disappear in the second half.
The cast is full of familiar faces, including Manny Jacinto of The Good Place, long-absent Glee actress Heather Morris, and comedy mainstay Margaret Cho. However, the movie completely wastes Darrell Hammond, playing a rare movie role as Cora’s father. From director Hannah Pearl Utt, Cora Bora would likely fall apart without Stalter, a welcome screen presence who succeeds at nailing complex material.