Daydream Nation

It's clear the first-time writer-director Michael Goldbach harbors an affection for the venerable indie-rock band Sonic Youth. Not only does the title share its name with their critically-acclaimed album, but the lead male character is named Thurston, certainly an homage to Sonic Youth's lead guitarist and vocalist Thurston Moore. But unlike Sonic Youth's brittle, noise-rock style, Daydream Nation the film is more like a cinematic version of emo-rock.

Kat Dennings plays a high-school girl who has moved from a big city to a small town for her senior year in high school. Right away I was irritated because this is all explained to us in voiceover. She tells us how hated she is by the other kids in the school, but we never see any of it. In fact, she goes to a party early on, where she meets Thurston (Reece Thompson), a fucked-up stoner who hangs with a bunch of kids who will smoke anything, from weed to kitchen-cleaning products.

Out of boredom, Dennings seduces an English teacher (Josh Lucas), who resists her at first out of professional decorum, but once enmeshed, becomes obsessed with her. He's kind of a cliche--the teacher working on a novel, which was much better done by Paul Giamatti in Sideways. When Dennings starts to respond to Thompson's awkward advances, Lucas goes crazy and tries to break them up.

Somewhere in here is a decent high-school story, a well-trod ground in movies, but it gets cluttered by too much business. There's a fatal car crash, a wild party, and even a serial killer, which lends what I'm sure Goldbach intended to be a Richard Kelly element but instead just makes the whole thing disjointed.

Dennings is an appealing young actress, and she knows a nice character arc, her sarcasm whittled away to reveal a soft inner core. Andie MacDowell, as Thompson's mother, also has some nice moments.

But Daydream Nation plays like a film school thesis, with a rough-draft script. If I were producing this film I would have suggested to Goldbach that he completely cut every bit of the voiceover--he might have found that it wasn't necessary.