Nearly a year after I first saw it at Sundance, I still can’t believe “I Melt With You” went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.
Do not mistake the ’80s-pop title to be an indicator of frolic and fun. This is more of a punk “Big Chill” in which four 44-year-old lifelong buddies (Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, Jeremy Piven and Christian McKay) gather for a vacation week in Big Sur. The Porsche joy rides in the desert, screaming bouts and Everests of cocaine are the restrained part. Then things get weird, but I won’t give it away.
The thundery soundtrack alone (Dead Kennedys, the Clash, early U2) is worth the ticket price. There is also, amid the self-indulgence, a rare sense of bleak masculine irony. And the movie captures, as well as any other, the feeling of partying into oblivion, minus the next-morning internal pitchfork stabs. Think of a wild friend you wouldn’t want to emulate but can’t let go of.
Like the Clash, director Mark Pellington and writer Glenn Porter have a bold idea and pursue it with abandon ablaze. They ask: What if you took urgent teen passions and grafted them onto slumping, rueful middle age? The effect is wicked, disorienting and spellbindingly inappropriate — somewhere between Sophocles and Sid Vicious.