Two thousand miles from Bushwick, it turns out there really is no escape: The President Garfield beards, the arm tats, the shabby interiors stuffed with ironic retro items, radical awareness-raising collectives, novelists afflicted with repressed rage, emo music boys, people named Tibet who work in lesbian bookstores: This is the year Sundance went full Brooklyn.
Here’s a look at some of the many films with a Brooklyn component, with a rating for each on a scale of one to four Pabst Blue Ribbons, with four indicating Maximum Brooklyn Overload.
Song One
Anne Hathaway plays the sister of a comatose struggling musician. She hooks up with her brother’s favorite emo singer (Johnny Flynn) and brings him to her brother’s bedside hoping that the songs will snap him out of it.
Brooklyn details: Soulful, expressive but simple music, plus Hathaway, using her brother’s diary, goes to all his favorite spots and collects various old-timey musical instruments hoping that these will help him wake up. If you’re walking into a bric-a-brac store looking for a gramophone you hope will cure your comatose brother, you’re probably in Brooklyn.
Rating: 2 PBRs.
Hits
The feature directorial debut of “Arrested Development” star David Cross, this broad satire of fame-hungry culture takes place mainly in a fictional Catskills town called Liberty, where a video of an eccentric local (Matt Walsh) goes viral after he has to be hauled out of community board meeting for screaming incessantly about potholes. A Brooklyn weed dealer (Michael Cera) tells two clients about it — they’re an Etsy user who sells feminist baby onesies and a beardy radical (James Adobian) who makes artisanal cardboard boxes and operates a small but enthusiastic social-justice collective whose members mainly just argue about what snacks to serve at meetings.
Brooklyn details: The three members of the activist group who can make it upstate (some of them can’t, because they have to attend box-kite conventions or similarly Brooklyn-ish activities) storm the town of Liberty to ironically cheer the angry citizen at the next community board meeting. By the time they get there, a different Brooklyn radical collective has gotten dibs on the story, though, and one of the biggest laughs I heard at the festival came when the first guy says his group is from Greenpoint. The second guy humiliates him with this response: “Oh. We’re based in Bushwick.”
Brooklyn rating: Despite the upstate setting, 3 PBRs.
Appropriate Behavior
Newcomer Desiree Akhavan, the writer-director-star, plays Shirin, an underemployed creative wandering the wilds of hipster Brooklyn while having issues with her girlfriend Max (Rebecca Henderson). After a breakup Shirin attempts to track down Max at the Park Slope Food Co-Op, where she tries and fails to get information out of a strict woman manager by seducing her.
Brooklyn details: Wall-to-wall. Dudes in little hats showing off their squid chest tats at parties, would-be artists babbling about their Kickstarter projects, couples who met at “Occupy Chelsea” (which means Manhattan, but still). There are kindergarten kids attending film school, Lesbian bookstore discussions hosted by a woman named Tibet, men with waxed Dali mustaches.
Brooklyn rating: 4 PBRs.
Listen Up Philip
Philip, a tiny, amusingly ill-tempered novelist (Jason Schwartzman) who is beginning to make a name for himself, mistreats his girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss) and is encouraged to be even more obnoxious by a famous older novelist (Jonathan Pryce) who convinces Philip to move out to the country to write and teach at a local university.
Brooklyn details: Though shot in Park Slope, it isn’t too site specific, but Philip definitely reads as a Brooklyn type who is way more tortured about his art than he needs to be and even announces to his publisher that he’s refusing to do any publicity before anyone even knows who he is. Bonus factor: When he got the call telling him his film had been accepted at Sundance, Brooklyn filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who wrote and directed this, was busy shopping for the ingredients for a potato leek soup he planned to make for his girlfriend, so he was all stressed out about that and told the Sundance guy he had to call him back.
Brooklyn rating: 1 PBR.