Kevin Smith revolutionized indie film 30 years ago with his debut film Clerks—he was 24. He’s spent the last few years alternating between making new sequels to Clerks and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, threatening to make sequels to Mallrats, and directing unrelated indie movies that don’t make much of an impact.
In the meantime, Smith has continued to produce podcasts and live events that, while dominated by stories he’s told many times before, are much more interesting than his recent films. He agreed to appear last year in a fascinating documentary called Chasing Chasing Amy, a young queer filmmaker’s reexamination of Smith’s 1997 comedy/drama about Ben Affleck falling in love with a lesbian.
Now, Smith has come out with a film that’s his most compelling work in years, and all it took was telling an autobiographical story about his teen self, as opposed to his aimless young adulthood. The 4:30 Movie is Smith’s The Fabelmans, the story of his teenage life and how it led to his becoming a filmmaker. It’s not as successful as the Spielberg version, nor is it even the best 1980s-set period piece about teenagers this year (that’s Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Snack Shack).
The film looks good and isn’t shot as indifferently as most of Smith’s recent work. While it’s about teenagers, there’s the usual raunchy dialogue. There are pop culture references, but Smith at least switches them up, sprinkling in pro wrestling, the New York Mets, and Poltergeist, although there is some Star Wars talk, too. Because there are all new characters and no need to shoehorn in decades of fan service, Smith can concentrate on telling a story. Most of Smith’s usual company of actors sits in this one, although Jason Lee plays the protagonist’s dad.
Austin Zajur stars as Smith’s stand-in, Brian David, a teenager who lives for afternoons sneaking into the 4:30 p.m. movie. He’s got a huge crush on a girl named Melody (Siena Agudong), and would like to take her to that day’s movie, but his troublemaking buddies get in the way. There’s also a movie theater manager (Ken Jeong) who thinks his minor job makes him a showbiz movie-and-shaker. Adam Pally as an usher (named “emo usher”), while Genesis Rodriguez shows up as an aspiring filmmaker—and I have a feeling if Smith really met a girl like her in New Jersey in 1986, she didn’t look much like Rodriguez. It also has that one scene, present in all of Smith’s early movies, in which a character gives the protagonist an important talking-to about 15 minutes from the end.
Smith has fun with the fake movies. Not only is the main feature a detective parody called “Bucklick,” but he also adds some fake trailers in the tradition of Grindhouse. One of them is going to piss off the Church even more than Smith’s Dogma did. I assume the part with the girlfriend happened much the way Smith remembers it. The romance is sweet, although at one point, his love interest swoons at him, impressed, and says, “You sure know a lot about movies.” As someone who knows a lot about movies, let me tell you—women don’t often do that.