Writer/director Kevin Smith has often looked to his own life for inspiration for his films. He famously turned his experiences as a convenience store register jockey into his breakout debut comedy Clerks and aspects of his film career for its two follow-ups. His comedies Chasing Amy and Dogma also drew on various life experiences while Mallrats is rooted in the 1980s sex comedies he watched as a teenager. That brings us to The 4:30 Movie, which is his nostalgic look back at his teenage years in the mid-1980s as a teenager spending their summer ingesting movies at the local cineplex and finding their first love.
As the summer of 1986 winds down and senior year of high school looms, Brian (Austin Zajur ) is looking forward to one more day of theater hopping at the local cinemaplex with his best buds Belly (Reed Northrup) and Burny (Nicholas Cirillo). He has also invited his crush Melody (Siena Agudong) to join them after she gets out of work, an addition to the plans that his friends are not necessarily happy with. However, they still have to contend with an afternoon of furtively moving between the different auditoriums while dodging oddball theater ushers and the eagle of the no nonsense theater manager who is always looking for an excuse to throw out unruly teenagers.
While admittedly a fan of most of Smith’s work, I can concede that his output can sometimes be inconsistent. Thankfully, while The 4:30 Movie does have a few problems, it swings more towards his stronger work than his lesser. That said, The 4:30 Movie is not without its issues, which may impede one’s overall enjoyment.
Smith’s strength has often been his own brand of stylized dialogue, with characters often speaking in pop culture references. And the characters of The 4:30 Movie indeed do make mention of numerous things that were fairly ubiquitous in the 1980s. Furthermore, many of the jokes play off of the audiences knowledge of what lies beyond the film’s 1986 setting. (“Bill Cosby… Now there’s a man who will always be beloved.”) The problem is where Smith normally uses this type of pop culture referencing, it is as light seasoning but here it feels as if the whole salt shaker dumped out onto the script. Brian and Burny’s conflict gets resolved at the end of the second act by each of them having unexpected conversations with older, wiser characters. While the convenient conversation is indeed a trope from 1980s teen comedies, and one that Smith employed to good effect with Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee in Mallrats, it strains credulity somewhat that both Brian and Burny each have one that sets them on the path back to reconciliation.
For a movie that is in part a love letter to the cinema-going experience for 1980s teens, the parody trailers and footage from the one film the kids are seeing in The 4:30 Movie really doesn’t look as if they are from that period. These are writer jokes that aren’t executed with the visual verisimilitude that they could or indeed should have been. (See the faux trailers in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s joint effort Grindhouse for an example of the execution done with a retro realism that sells the joke better.)
But these are mostly cosmetic blemishes on the main story, which is suffused with a sweet emotional core. Smith does a great job at capturing that tentative and scary moment in a teenager’s life, reaching out to one’s first big crush, trying to find that balance in being one’s self and the person you think will impress them. The tension between Brian and his two friends over the introduction of a girlfriend into their own group dynamic feels authentic and drives its portion of the story. Zajur and Agudong have a chemistry really helps sell their shared screentime as we watch the pair’s hesitant flirtation. The mood is enhanced by Yaron Levy’s cinematography, which evokes a slight haze of memory for times now past.
