After making a film about an obsessive teenage wannabe Hollywood director, Gabriel LaBelle went from The Fabelmans (2022) — in which he starred as a thinly veiled version of its co-writer-director Steven Spielberg — to a film about an aspiring 30-year-old TV showrunner, playing SNL creator Lorne Michaels in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night (2024). Dempsey Bryk’s debut feature Crash Land brings him back full circle to the world of no-budget movie-making, putting his bearded baby-faced appeal to good use in a coming-of-age story that makes up in naive charm what it might otherwise lack in originality.
Films about exuberant no-talent amateur filmmakers are an interesting sub-sector within the whole film-within-a-film genre, and Crash Land makes the smart choice not to riff on specific movies, a key flaw in the likes of Be Kind Rewind and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Instead, the three heroes at the heart of Bryk’s film are stuntmen, albeit of the kamikaze Jackass variety, and in the film’s very brief opening set-up we find them out in a field somewhere, riding a bicycle hard at a burning tire that’s hanging from a tree.
This, however, will be the first and last we see of Darby (Billy Bryk), who promptly suffers a brain aneurysm and dies. At his funeral, his buddies Lance (LaBelle) and Clay (Noah Parker) play a clip-reel of Darby’s greatest hits, which seem mostly to involve finding elaborate new ways to hit himself in the nuts. The tribute is cut short by the arrival of Darby’s mother, who issues a stern rebuke to the boys, saying, “Darby wasted all of his time with you two. He lived a meaningless life and he died for nothing. And it was your fault.”
There is more than a degree of truth in this assessment (Darby’s famous last words were “Eat my ass!”), but Lance and Clay are bewildered (“He was more than a man — he was a stuntman”). This brief funk is broken when Clay comes home to find his mother — who, like everyone else in their backwoods local area, despises their stunts — watching an old movie on TV. This, she tells Clay is real art, which gives him the idea to shoot their own movie and incorporate Derby’s clip reel into the storyline. Lance is initially horrified but quickly gets into it: “Maybe movies aren’t shit — just the ones that have been made so far!”
A brainstorming session establishes the things that made up “a great f*cking movie”, which include explosions, car chases, gunfights, elves (a nod to Lord of the Rings) and girls, and armed with that checklist, the boys recruit their friend Sander (Finn Wolfhard) as their reluctant director. To play the love interest, Lance and Clay are limited in their options; the only girl in town “who doesn’t hate us” is the French-Canadian Jemma (Abby Quinn), a recent arrival in town. Jemma accepts, but on condition that the film be something that people will “love and cherish forever” with “beauty and emotion”. And with that, she’s in.
With Jemma on board, the film starts to take a welcome turn away from frat-boy gross-out comedy into something a little more thoughtful and a lot more nuanced as the characters reveal more of their true selves. A running joke about the boys’ film illiteracy never gets old, giving up some great one-liners, like “I’ve seen a dozen movies — I know”, and “A masterpiece is the biggest thing there is”. More surprisingly, the checklist of stunts does lend itself to the film-with-in-the-film’s ever-unfolding, ad hoc script, with the boys wearing a very funny cut-out of Darby’s face to give the illusion of a leading man holding it all together.
Happily, however, this isn’t just the story of some idiots making a terrible film; indeed, Bryk’s film would make a great cornfield-ennui double bill with Jon Watts’ Cop Car — as is hinted in the opening scenes of rural boredom, the boys have nothing to look forward to in a town where stasis has already claimed the older residents. Lance, in particular, has good reasons for his refusal to grow up, and there’s much more to Darby’s story than first meets the eye, which is why, finally Crash Land reveals itself as the warm and unexpectedly moving story of overgrown kids clinging onto their youth for just that little bit too long.
Title: Crash Land
Festival: SXSW (Narrative Spotlight)
Director/Screenwriter: Dempsey Bryk
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Finn Wolfhard, Billy Bryk, Noah Parker, Abby Quinn
Sales: CAA
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins
