Lillian Wade (Talia Ryder) is just not like the other girls in her grade. The insouciant high school senior favours black skinny jeans and an oversized Led Zeppelin tee over the denim shorts and crop tops sported by her peers; sitting in silence by herself on their bus ride up to Washington D.C. for a time-honoured school trip to the nation’s capital. Alone in a scuzzy bar bathroom while her classmates perform painful rap-rock karaoke, she sings dreamily to her own reflection in the mirror: “I’m blissed, I’m kissed,” goes the enchanting Paul Grimstad original, performed by the actor herself. “I’m the cat that lost its black.”
A gunshot breaks the reverie and, as a Pizzagate-inspired hold-up plays out, Lillian abandons her iPhone and escapes through a secret door with emo-punk Caleb (Earl Cave), a self-identified ‘artivist’. From here she falls in with Caleb’s travelling band of lefty anarchists, who are unfortunately far more adept at getting stoned and spending their trust fund money on genital piercings than effectively organising against anything. Following the group on a misguided demonstration at a New Jersey national park, Lillian happens upon a pack of Neo-Nazis hosting a barbecue, naturally. Their number includes Lawrence (a wonderfully creepy turn from Red Rocket’s Simon Rex), a college professor who takes her in when she co-opts and regurgitates an abuse story one of the progressives had told her the night before.
As an academic and avid Edgar Allen Poe stan, Lawrence prizes himself above his less-agreeable fascist peers. “It’s an irony unique to this stage of racial consciousness,” he explains, gesturing disapprovingly at the tattooed skinheads that surround them. At his home, Lillian becomes a live-in Lolita to Lawrence’s long-suffering Humbert Humbert: frolicking in pastel-coloured baby doll dresses, coquettishly tying bows in her hair and sleeping under a swastika-patterned bedspread. But she quickly tires of this shut-in lifestyle, and convinces Lawrence to take her to a hotel in New York City, where she may or may not undress in his presence — the possibility alone is enough to compel him to do her bidding.
The Sweet East frames Lillian’s beauty and passivity as a kind of agency: the men she encounters are immediately paternal towards her, taken in by her sharp features and perpetually vacant expression. Everyone wants her to be his manic pixie dream girl, a perfect blank canvas for their desires. But Lillian is far too disaffected and canny to get caught up in any of these bumbling fools’ bildungsromans, choosing instead to lie through her teeth about who she is and where she’s from in order to carve out her own Americana narrative: one that might afford her something like real agency, or at least a valid path out of her claustrophobic South Carolina family home.
One of the more promising routes to this end appears in the form of Molly and Matthew, a delusional director-producer duo (a pair of delightfully off-kilter performances from Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) who plead with Lillian to star in their bizarre, butter-centric period film As It Churned opposite big-time movie star Ian Reynolds (Jacob Elordi). It’s certainly not a hard sell, and Lillian is more than ready to ditch Lawrence when this opportunity arises. But when she becomes a minor celebrity for her involvement with Ian, it becomes clear that Alice has to leave Wonderland sometime or another.
Under Sean Price Williams’ engaging direction, Nick Pinkerton’s script feels timely as a critique of the kind of feminine detachment from responsibility that has underscored the current tradwife resurgence; satirising the sort of right-wing ideas that, under a vaguely respectable veneer, vapid, self-interested characters are easily taken in by. In it, there are echoes of Martine Syms’ The African Desperate, another punchy debut feature that instead takes square aim at the faux-liberalism of artistic academia. But whether Price Williams and Pinkerton are as conscious in their commentary as Syms feels doubtful, especially in the context of the former’s remarks against unions and the appearance of names like Dasha Nekrasova’s in the thank you section of the credits.
While a raucous, thoroughly entertaining picaresque featuring what’s sure to be a star-making performance from Talia Ryder, The Sweet East is not quite as provocative as it would like to think it is. Perhaps though it is the work of true patriots: dedicated residents willing to criticise the home they love but unable, at this stage (of ‘racial consciousness’ or artistic development), to ask any more of it.