There are definitely irksome components in this microbudget drama set largely inside a creaking Cadillac, but there are redeeming features as well. In the debit column, there are way too many vaguely admiring montages that show the sibling central characters Jake (Scott Monahan, also the film’s director and producer) and John (Dakota Loesch, also the film’s screenwriter) ingesting a pharmacopeia of drugs, from “roxy” to heroin. Likewise, a lot of the naturalistic dialogue is a tad repetitive, like the long debates over whether they should sell all the drugs they have stolen (currently hidden in teddy bears in the trunk of the Caddy) in Los Angeles or Anchorage, Alaska. In the latter city, their illicit haul would fetch a much higher price – but only if they don’t neck it all first on the way.
A lot rides on whether viewers can find these two crazy, mixed-up twentysomething kids interesting or sympathetic enough to make it worth riding along with them for a journey that takes a very wrong turn two-thirds of the way in. A passing reminiscence about their late mother “towards the end” when she always wore a headscarf, suggests post-traumatic grief nibbling away at their psyches in the background, but does that really excuse both men’s tendency towards sudden, pointless violence?
On the other hand, there are some very artful craft contributions on show. First and foremost is Erin Naifeh’s high-definition cinematography, which evokes the stark, merciless glare of the sun in the California desert through which Jake and John travel, a landscape punctuated only by ghost towns and graffiti-splattered ruins. In one of the more entertaining interludes, the brothers pretend to lean out of the car windows and shout pleasantries to imaginary neighbours, spoofing the home-town manners of suburbia.
Clearly, one of the things that bonds them is a shared appetite for amateur improv, judging by the way they compete at another point to see who can give the most convincingly choked-up eulogy for each other at an imaginary funeral. Rather than the characters themselves, it’s Monahan and Loesch who display substantial acting talent, even in moments when they’re doing nothing much more than staring into space, stricken, confused and fundamentally lost.
With Jake sporting a ridiculous grille of gold teeth and bright blue hair, and John rocking a shabby set of red longjohns (suggesting a character who is somehow always still in bed), they are a colourful pair, like toddlers playing at being gangsters, or versions of Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon with a car instead of a tree to shelter them. Samuel Beckett probably would have found all those montages tedious, but he might have grooved to Anchorage’s underlying nihilism.
• Anchorage is released on 1 September in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
