Film reviews: The Prom | David Byrne’s American Utopia | Smiley Face Killers | Dreamland | Cocoon

As two thespians in search of a good cause in Broadway adaptation The Prom, Meryl Streep and James Corden are about as subtle as a couple of bricks, writes Alistair Harkness

Meryl Streep and James Corden in The Prom PIC: Melinda Sue Gordon / Netflix © 2020

The Prom (12A) ***

David Byrne’s American Utopia (12A) ****

Smiley Face Killers (18) ****

A scene from David Byrne's American Utopia

Dreamland (15) **

Cocoon (15) ***

An exercise in super-charged gaiety from Glee creator Ryan Murphy, Broadway adaptation The Prom is the sort of musical that wants to have its cake and eat it. Meryl Streep and James Corden respectively play Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman, the former a Broadway diva who thinks the worthiness of a role is a direct reflection of her own fabulousness as a human being – and the latter pretty much the same, only younger, campier and significantly less acclaimed. When their latest show together, a musical based on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, closes on opening night after a critical savaging, they decide they need to devote themselves to a brand-enhancing good cause that will prove to the critics they’re not the self-obsessed egomaniacs they’ve been (correctly) identified as.

Finding the perfect issue on Twitter in the form of a gay high school student (Jo Ellen Pellman) who’s been banned from taking her girlfriend to prom, it’s not long before Dee Dee, Barry, their perennial chorus-line pal Angie (a game Nicole Kidman), and Trent (Andrew Rannells), a Juilliard-trained wannabe working as a bartender, descend upon her conservative Indiana town, proudly announcing themselves as New York liberals, here to overturn its residents’ Red State-ingrained homophobia.

Cocoon

Like the characters themselves, the film isn’t all that interested in doing the hard-work of bridging the cultural divide; this is mostly a preaching-to-the-choir celebration of the joys of musical theatre and to that end it can be terrifically entertaining thanks to some dazzling routines, sharp one-liners and outré performances.

Sticking with Broadway, the Spike Lee-directed David Byrne’s American Utopia captures the former Talking Heads frontman’s late 2019/early 2020 residency at New York’s Hudson Theatre where he performed a nightly version of his innovative 2018 concert tour. Incorporating songs from the album of the same title, as well as classic Talking Heads tracks and solo cuts, the film is a cross between a live concert and piece of performance art, one that puts us front, centre, left, right and even up above the show (Lee shoots from all angles) as Byrne explores a more positive idea of the United States through music, personal anecdotes and the free movement of his musicians across his purposely spartan stage.

Watched in the wake of Trump’s reluctant defeat, the film certainly feels like an affirmation of everything Byrne – who discusses his own status as a Scottish immigrant to the US – holds dear. But it’s Lee’s ability to capture and convey liveness on screen that really ramps up the poignancy of the film. Shot just before the world went into lockdown, its ability to get you dancing in your own living room makes it a very welcome companion piece to Jonathan Demme’s classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense.

Having directed the most nihilistic teen movie of all time with 1986’s cult classic River’s Edge, veteran US director Tim Hunter’s latest, Smiley Face Killers, sees him re-team with River’s Edge star Crispin Glover for one of the stranger serial killer movies of recent years. Scripted by American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, and apparently based on true events linked to a spate of mysterious drownings involving male college students, it takes a subversive approach to the genre by presenting the story mostly as a character study of the killer’s next target, Jake (Ronen Rubinstein), a good-looking but troubled student whose decision to go off his meds coincides with him receiving a series of weird text messages that his girlfriend fears he might have been sending himself.

Hunter spends the first two-thirds of the movie tracking Jake like he’s prey, but he also gives the film a strangely blissed-out quality, ensuring it plays like a dream that’s about to turn bad, which it promptly does with the appearance of Glover as a hooded, van-dwelling occultist with a blood-lust and a crew of willing disciples. It’s freaky, engrossing stuff and Glover’s casting provides a neat link to his earlier collaboration with Hunter; it’s entirely possible to believe that the off-the-rails teen he played in River’s Edge would turn into a kind of garage band Charles Manson.

Featuring Margot Robbie as a bank-robbing outlaw who takes up with a dirt-poor 17-year-old (Finn Cole) desperate to escape his own mundane dustbowl existence, the Depression era-set Dreamland could have been an interesting fusion of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands had director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte had the courage of his convictions and built it around Robbie’s character. Instead he spends so long framing it as the story of a comic-book-reading teenage boy obsessed with his long-absent father that watching it feels like queuing up for a dull theme park ride into the past.

There’s more coming-of-age drama in Cocoon, an earnest Berlin-set teen movie about a young girl discovering her sexuality during the hottest summer on record. As indicated by the film’s title and the way writer/director Leonie Krippendorff sets up the main character, Nora (Lena Urzendowsky), as a budding lepidopterist, it’s not exactly subtle in its efforts to dramatise what Nora is going through. Then again, neither are the feelings teenagers have at this age, so all the transformation symbolism feels appropriate rather than condescending.

The Prom is on selected release now and streams on Netflix from 11 December, David Byrne’s American Utopia and Smiley Face Killers are available on digital download from 14 December, Dreamland is in UK cinemas from 11 December, Cocoon is in cinemas and on demand from 11 December.

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