Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) is a driver for the taxi-app "Spree", but his real dream is to become a social media star. Yet nobody seems to watch his videos, save Bobby the kid he babysat (who is now a social media superstar) and even then it seems only to pity and mock him. But over the course of one night, he has a plan to change all of that. With his car rigged with cameras, we follow, and are indeed trapped with, Kurt in "kurtsworld96" over the course of a strange day...
I liked this movie a lot, but I'll preface by telling you all that it is not for everybody. The gimmick is that it's done entirely through a livestream and the occasional CCTV camera or other person's phone, and it uses this to full effect. But the reason it's not for all of you is that it is a vicious and snarling satire which is very much on the nose: early on some of the passengers' writing is a tad clunky, but it gets them across.
We follow Kurt as he desperately chases trends, begs to be liked, covets the dream of media celebrity and online persona with every fibre of his being. And the genius is in casting Joe Keery, who goes for this 110%: the supernaturally charming and likeable Steven Harrington is here the most pathetic, awful psychopath he could possibly be, unable to discern reality from delusion; and manufacturing his own twisted, shallow plastic reality, imitating those around him as if they are what he should aspire to be. And all throughout, we are trapped there with him on this journey, and maybe the person he hates is himself...
The audience he craves are convinced all of this is fake, and Kurt is furiously attempting to "appear real" in his manufactured authenticity, and even when things get messy that line is blurred and stepped over...
But there is never a moment of personal triumph for Kurt, we never think "fuck yeah", and neither do we see him grow or even want him to. He also never is made to be empathised with, he's too needy, too desperate, too shallow, too empty for that. His journey is one of a downward spiral (in parallel with his rise), and in the moments where one would normally empathise with this sort of character (chiefly where he drives his dad, played by David Arquette, and what was the last thing you saw him in which wasn't Courtney Cox?), we instead watch him consume himself and push away humanity. His interactions with people are solely to further his channel, and what he thinks people want, but he has no identity or core values of his own, he has no personality to speak of, not really.
It's a good "Joker", in that regard. Remember the messy message of that relatively mediocre movie and how it was grasping at attempts at depth, wherein it tried desperately to be "deep" and "about something", whilst simultaneously claiming it was nihilistic and "cool" but simply echoing better people it had seen before it, nodding its head when people called it "original"?
"Spree", to me at least, is an answering call to that. At least "Spree" is INTENTIONALLY doing those things with its lead character.
This would make an excellent double bill with either "Ingrid Goes West" or, if you're feeling lazy, "American Psycho".
The movie is not subtle (don't let humanity run away from you, don't worship social media stars, the internet is a cesspit, people will worship psychopaths, celebrity is a fleeting and amorphous thing, the technical age is a whole barrel of yikes) but it doesn't have to be. The comments in it are fantastic, I want to watch it again just to read some of those, and its supporting cast are uniformly good, whilst some of them early on are bordering on cartoonish and under-cooked. The gimmick is executed extremely well and the makers have clearly done their research, and it never outstays its welcome, though there is a slight dip over the halfway point which it recovers from, and it actually gets to the central business of its plot SURPRISINGLY quickly.
It's a movie about chasing clout, and a parasite in the digital age, and Joe Keery is fucking great in this.
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