‘Drinking and Driving’ Review: Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank Wonder If Empty Rural Hedonism Can Ever Give Way to Transcendence

When you name your movie “Drinking and Driving” — assuming it’s not some kind of pun that leads into a wholesome comedy about a NASCAR star named Richard Drinking — you preemptively lower everyone’s expectations for the role models they’re about to see onscreen.

It’s certainly warranted in the case of Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank’s new movie, a slice-of-life dramedy about the empty recklessness of two friends who wile away the days of their early adulthood with an endless stream of substance abuse in their small rural hometown. Drinking and driving have become a regular part of the routine, as mundane as 5 a.m. cocaine bumps or curing hangovers with molly after spending another late night partying in a loose acquaintance’s basement.

It’s not like Palmer (Avalon) and Iris (Frank) have anything better to do. Their lives are small and seemingly meaningless: the two girls never left their hometown, work the same dead-end restaurant job, and even share a bed on the nights they manage to make it home in time to sleep. With a limited social circle, they end up hanging out with the same neighbors and swooning over the same toxic boys who all look like Post Malone if his career had never taken off. Palmer and Iris seem to enjoy themselves a solid 60 percent of the time as they drift from backyard to dirt bike track to someone’s basement or car. The Jarmusch-esque “plot” revolves around them meeting up with an acquaintance named Levi (Ethan Hawksworth) and his cousin Phoenix (Henri Gillespi), in town and bopping from place to place without a plan.

The film is admirably committed to documenting this lifestyle without much idealization or condemnation. Occasional moments of real, spontaneous joy emerge, and others reveal the crushing emptiness of lives going nowhere, but the script doesn’t lean too hard in either direction. Fast and Frank provide enough context clues to show us that these girls dealt with mediocre parenting and limited economic mobility — enough to keep humane viewers from judging or disliking them too much, but mercifully not enough to turn it into a story of victimhood.

The first two acts of “Drinking and Driving” almost play like a nature documentary, showing us four creatures in their natural habitat going through the only survival mechanisms they know. The cinematography feels deliberately ugly, with greens, grays, and browns blurring together to paint a muddy picture of the town you never make it out of. The often-handheld camerawork creates the sensation of watching old home videos, even if most of these encounters don’t seem worthy of documentation.

“Drinking and Driving” is downright cinéma vérité compared to the expressionism of Fast’s earlier work like “Camp,” but it still drifts slightly away from pure realism by the end. Much of the film plays its own version of conventional “the party has to end eventually” coming-of-age beats, even if these parties never seem that great to begin with. But since these girls don’t have anything that looks like conventional adulthood waiting for them, the film wisely steers them away from maturity and toward a kind of spiritual liberation. Can real transcendence come from sharing physical pleasures with unremarkable people who just happen to live in the same town as you? Nobody can fully answer that question, but Fast and Frank get closer than you might think.

Even if no scene is particularly riveting on its own, the film still comes together into something oddly compelling. “Drinking and Driving” seems to exist in a liminal space where the past is not worth remembering, and the future is nothing to look forward to, so all there is to do is squeeze any hedonistic pleasure that you can out of today, even if we can already see that those experiences won’t be worth remembering either. The small-town American setting grounds the film in a sense of regional specificity, but that sense of 2020s malaise and the pockets of joy that it occasionally creates should be universal.

Grade: C+

A Muscle Distribution release, “Drinking and Driving” will screen at BAM Rose Cinemas from October 11-13.