87 min | R | August 26, 2022 | A24
A teenage cartoonist drops out of school to chase a grimy ideal of artistic authenticity. He worships a former color separator at a comics company and mistakes a broken man for a mentor. The kid wants to suffer for his art, and the movie makes sure he does.
Robert is a New Jersey teenager who draws comics and believes that real art comes from real degradation. He abandons a comfortable suburban life and a college track to live in a sweltering basement and work scut jobs near the courthouse. The film is about the lie that misery makes you authentic. Owen Kline builds a coming-of-age story where the kid pursues squalor on purpose because he thinks comfort is fake and discomfort is true. Funny Pages watches that delusion collide with the actual people who live the life Robert romanticizes.
Daniel Zolghadri plays Robert with a self-satisfied stubbornness that curdles into something harder to like. He is not a sweet protagonist. He uses people and calls it apprenticeship. Matthew Maher plays Wallace, the former color separator Robert latches onto, with a coiled menace that detonates in public. Maher makes Wallace pitiable and dangerous in the same gesture. Miles Emanuel plays Miles, the loyal friend Robert keeps discarding, and Josh Pais plays the father whose patience runs out in real time.
Kline directs and writes his first feature and shoots it on 16mm so every surface looks sweaty and secondhand. The grain is not nostalgia. It makes the basements and back rooms feel airless and infected. The camera lingers on bad skin, cluttered desks, and fluorescent-lit dental offices until the whole world seems to need a shower. Kline edits the cringe to last a beat longer than is comfortable, holding on social disasters past the point of release.
This is a film built to repel the audience that wants its outsider stories warm. Robert learns nothing clean. The people he idolizes are damaged in ways he refuses to see because seeing them would ruin the fantasy. Kline has the nerve to deny any redemption and the discipline to make the ugliness mean something. The result is abrasive on purpose and it earns the abrasion.