100 min | R | September 13, 2022 | Lionsgate
Dante and Randal still run the Quick Stop, twenty-eight years older and no closer to peace. After a heart attack, Randal decides to make a movie about his life behind the counter. Kevin Smith puts his own near-death on screen and asks you to cry about it.
Dante Hicks and Randal Graves now own the Quick Stop convenience store where they have wasted their entire adult lives. Randal suffers a massive heart attack and survives. The brush with death convinces him to direct a black-and-white film about the only thing he knows, which is the store and the customers and Dante. The movie he wants to make is the first Clerks. Kevin Smith builds the film around his own 2018 heart attack and turns the production into a feature-length monument to his own filmography.
Brian O’Halloran plays Dante as a man drowning in grief he cannot articulate. He carries a loss through the film and O’Halloran lets it leak out in moments when Randal’s enthusiasm leaves a gap. Jeff Anderson plays Randal with the same caustic delivery that defined him in 1994, and the rust shows. Rosario Dawson appears as Becky in scenes that exist to wound Dante rather than develop her. Jason Mewes and Smith reprise Jay and Silent Bob as drug dealers turned legal weed merchants, and the gag runs out of fuel fast.
Smith directs and writes the film as a recreation of his own debut, which means long stretches are restagings of scenes the audience already knows. The cinematography mimics the flat fluorescent look of the original store interior, then breaks into deliberate black-and-white for the film-within-the-film. That formal choice is the one real idea here. The editing leans on cameos and callbacks, stacking references until the movie stops being a story and becomes an inventory of Smith’s career. The score swells under the death-and-rebirth beats with no restraint at all.
This is a film about mortality made by a man who survived his own and decided to process it by remaking the thing that made him famous. The autobiography is sincere. The execution buries that sincerity under nostalgia and recycled jokes that worked better when the actors were young and the budget was nothing. Dante and Randal deserved an ending about who they became. Smith gives them an ending about who they used to be.