Director: Bruce McDonald
Cast: Dylan Authors, Allan Hawco, Molly Parker, Julia Sarah Stone
Runtime: 89 minutes
Canadian master Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments) teams with veteran playwright and screenwriter Daniel MacIvor (Trigger) for a coming-of-age road movie with the perfect blend of magic and naturalism.
It’s July 1976, and the USA is celebrating its bicentennial. But, north of the border in the small Nova Scotian town of Antigonish it’s a weekend like any other, which means not much is going on. Music-loving 15-year-old Kit (Dylan Authorsm, The Husband) spends his time either alone in his room listening to Elton John albums, or hanging out with his platonic girlfriend, Alice (Julia Sarah Stone, a 2014 TIFF Rising Star know for her performance in Wet Bum). Like Kit, Alice feels out of place, and her divorced parents have too many issues of their own to offer much comfort.
Craving a turning point in their lives, the two decide to hitchhike to Sydney on Cape Breton Island to visit Kit’s glamorous but unstable mother, Laura (Molly Parker, The 9th Life of Louis Drax, Men with Brooms) — a journey guided, by a laconic Andy Warhol apparition (Rhys Bevan-John, Roaming). Through their quest for something bigger and better — both on the road and at their destination — they’ll face some truths about themselves that will point the way to a more honest, fully lived future.
Accompanied by a suitably killer ’70s soundtrack, and shot in softly sunlit black and white, McDonald’s film is grounded in its quiet and life-affirming moments; the film’s offbeat sense of humour arises organically from the differences in the ways its characters express their love. These sweet weirdos are temporar- ily lost, but they’re about to help each other find out where they’re headed.
It’s ultimately Stone who walks away with the picture. Adding an impatient clarity to the old-soul watchfulness she displayed in Wet Bum, she slowly becomes Weirdos’ moral centre. And it’s something to see.
—Norm Wilner, Now Magazine
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