Funny Pages
Directed by Owen Kline
Running time: 1hr26 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Daniel Zolghadri stars in Funny Pages
What kind of film would you expect from the son of Oscar-winner Kevin Kline and eighties icon Phoebe Cates? A polished, well-heeled reflection, perhaps, on cosseted worlds of celebrity and privilege: vapid at worst, self-effacing if we’re lucky, and likely studded with cameos from A-list family friends?
If that’s your guess — and why wouldn’t it be? — prepare to be pleasantly surprised by the scuzzy, scruffy, riotous unpleasantness of Owen Kline’s debut Funny Pages, which goes out of its way to avoid comfort or cliche in its story of a middle-class New Jersey teenager trying to rough up his lifestyle and his social circle in order to hack it as an underground comic-book artist. There’s the giveaway: in making a film about masking your bourgeois familial privilege to make something raw and ugly and true, Kline has, against all odds, done exactly that.
You have to be very, very smart and very, very funny to pull off that trick: Kline’s jagged script is both, drawing from a well of extreme cringe comedy that has largely fallen out of favour in recent American indie filmmaking, and rather winsomely copping to its own slightness, rather than attempting any kind of grand generational statement. He knows his own perspective, in other words, which is what his young protagonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri, tousle-haired and appealing but just prickly enough) has yet to learn: he’s in thrall to any elders who can help him in that department, but has spectacularly bad instincts in sussing them out.
A gnarled, chaotic chain of mishaps begins with his middle-aged, off-the-wall art teacher encouraging the devoted Robert to draw him nude; from that inauspicious start, the poor kid tangles with the law, takes an admin job in a crummy public defender’s office, leaves his parents’ plush house for the single grottiest basement flatshare ever captured on film, and strikes up a fractious anti-friendship with the impoverished, mentally ill Wallace (the riveting Matthew Maher, radiating hostile anxiety), who once worked as a colourist on one of Robert’s favourite comics, and hasn’t a clue what to do with the boy’s misplaced fandom.
Kline trades in very human grotesques, taking his cue visually and tonally from the warped outsider sensibility of comic artists like Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar. He could have filled his debut with movie stars (his own parents, maybe) in bad wigs and dentures. Instead, he has sought out the unusual faces and figures that casting directors tend to skip past: individually, these character performers give wonderful, eccentric performances, but collectively, they give Funny Pages a necessary spirit of rebellion, of outsiders seizing the controls and spinning way out of them.
Years ago, Kline starred as a strange, masturbation-fixated teen in Noah Baumbach’s marvellous The Squid and the Whale, and his shift into directing has some of the caustic, confrontational comic sensibility of Baumbach’s earlier work, albeit pushed further past the bounds of good taste and behaviour. Perhaps he’ll follow Baumbach, too, into prestigious all-star dramatic filmmaking, though on the evidence of this blunt, barbed debut, that’s a long way off: Funny Pages is still content to be the weird, scary, slightly fascinating kid at the back of the bus.
FUNNY PAGES (2022) Written by Owen Kline | Shot by Sean Price Williams, Hunter Zimny | Edited by Erin DeWitt, Owen Kline