Thanks in part to The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy has become a big-enough star to dominate the poster for Here Are the Young Men, an otherwise forgettable coming-of-age drama streaming April 27 from Well Go USA Entertainment.
Based on a novel by Rob Doyle, Here Are the Young Men follows three high-school graduates through a booze- and drug-fueled summer in Dublin. They are: Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a cut-rate Goth mooning about in black garb and sunglasses; Joe Kearney (Finn Cole), a small, seething mass of toxic masculinity; and uber-sensitive Matthew (Dean-Charles Chapman), tire-shop employee by day, sense-deadened depressive by night.
Kearney’s got daddy issues and a lot of bottled-up rage, masked by glib assurances that he’s not a wanker, loser, druggie, homosexual, thief, or murderer, despite his escalating fury at the homeless, women, family, and friends. Kearney graduates from harmless but mean-spirited vandalism to lacing drugs with strychnine to attempted rape of his best friend’s girl, egged on by The Big Show, a possibly hallucinated US cable series espousing violence.
As they say, that’s a lot to unpack, even for an actor as talented and confident as Cole, a veteran of the series Peaky Blinders and Animal Kingdom. Although Cole tries to make sense of Kearney’s wild psychological swings, his sense of victimhood, his thirst for adrenaline, the character as written is too obviously nuts to engage.
Still, Kearney dominates the narrative to an unhealthy extent. Rez disappears into suicidal fantasies, while Matthew, the narrator and ostensible lead, comes off as a drippy, dreary crybaby incapable of action. Somehow Matthew has acquired a smart, self-assured girlfriend, Jen (Taylor-Joy), but he is too wracked by sullen self-doubts to do much with her.
Writer and director Eoin Macken throws the entire Big Book of Cinematic Tricks at his story, employing flashbacks, voice-overs, filters, flashing lights, techno tracks, fish-eyes, slow-motion, jumps cuts, you name it to breath life into cold porridge. Say you haven’t seen Mean Streets or Trainspotting or American Pie or Lost Boys or Beats or Reprise or Rebel Without a Cause or frankly any movie in which males bond. Could you still find anything original in Here Are the Young Men? I am warning you now.
Taylor-Joy brings some life to her stereotyped role, but she’s not on screen enough. Otherwise, Here Are the Young Men a sad, slow slog through a rich kids’ summer of parties and privilege. Its Dublin is a city of endless garbage-strewn alleys and graffiti as opportunities to pose soulfully in wretched teen clothes. Its lessons are pitiful: don’t rape, don’t kill (except when you have to), and don’t go to America.
Here Are the Young Men screened at the 2020 Galway Film Fleadh.
