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How to Talk to Girls at Parties
***
Dir: John Cameron Mitchell (15, 102 mins)
Starring: Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Ruth Wilson
(USA, 15, 1hr 42mins)
A bizarre hybrid of punk rock, sci-fi, romance comedy and body horror, the latest effort from Hedwig and the Angry Inch director Mitchell is anything but easy to classify.
Tonally incoherent, the film, based on a Neil Gaiman short story, has things to say about anti-establishment movements and true love but it’s messily told. Alex Sharp plays Enn, a part time punk and fanzine editor in 1977 Croydon, hanging out with his best mates Vic and John (AJ Lewis and Ethan Lawrence). After an encounter with Nicole Kidman’s eccentric punk Boadicea (off-kilter accent alert), they find themselves at a party where aliens are showing their offspring what humans are like, in every way. Here Enn meets Elle Fanning’s youthful alien, Zan, and the two of them embark on an escapade around London’s punk scene. They naturally fall for each other against alien wishes; Zan gets to be in a punk happening with lots of characterful support blunders through from the likes of Matt Lucas and Ruth Wilson.
It’s all over the place, supposedly capturing the rebelliousness of the punk era, but How to Talk to Girls at Parties is often irritating rather than engaging. The film doesn’t settle on being one thing or another – a scattershot hybrid that ultimately cannot satisfy every genre it dips its toes into. Its ambition is to be lauded: its execution however is more suspect. Destined to gain some sort of cult status (Kidman’s accent alone guarantees that), this punks vs aliens smorgasbord doesn’t quite add up.
words Keiron Self
Out in cinemas from May 11