If you haven’t heard of Sean Price Williams, you’ve probably seen his work. The Delaware-born cinematographer’s filmography is a disaffected film nerd’s wet dream. He’s a go-to shooter for The Safdie brothers (Good Time, Heaven Knows What) and Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, Listen Up Philip), he cut his teeth holding the camera for heavy-hitting documentarians like Albert Maysles, he’s a former employee of once-famous and now Alamo basement–dwelling Kim’s Video and Music.
Williams’s cinematography is an exercise in proximity. His heavy-grained, handheld camerawork is maybe the best aesthetic torchbearer of John Cassavetes, a barrage of claustrophobic close-ups of hands and faces and twitches and tics that congeal in Williamsburg one-bedrooms until they burst into limitless skylines. Gritty and New York are descriptors pummeled into ubiquity via the wrong Robert Pattinson movies, but the shoe fits with SPW—his thumbprints shaped the grooves of the dirtbag NYC film scene of the 2010s.
Now, Williams has released his directorial debut with The Sweet East, a wildly American collaboration with film critic and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton. It’s a hypercontemporary, thorny, and thrilling picaresque, one bizarrely predictive of both 2024’s state of U.S. discourse and rising class of haute performers. Today’s Blood Jump tackles Williams’s first and latest flicks: The Sweet East. Frownland. Let’s begin.
Longest way ‘round is the shortest way home
There is little familiar about The Sweet East, even less so derivative. The former lives almost exclusively within the film’s first few minutes: an e-girl endures benign drivel from her himbo fling on a school trip to Washington, D.C., before they rejoin their class to fight, fuck, and party across the nation’s capital. You can trace the faintest shadow of a 2010s hangout flick in that opening salvo, but The Sweet East calls its own bluff before a Skrillex needle-drop can wedge its Vans through the door. As if awoken from a dream of the same era, Andy Milonakis open fires into the ceiling of a pizza joint, demanding the truth about the libs that traffic children through the restaurant’s basement. Williams and Pinkerton wisely employ a few stopgaps that prevent their debut from feeling obnoxiously satirical—there are no celebrity presidents, no debates of vaccine efficacy—but the nod to Pizzagate sets the pace for the remaining runtime. It amounts to a reflexively American and extremely 2020s movie, a document as fractious, discursive, and beguilingly alive as any day in the country.
At the center of it all is Lillian, played with due sedation by Talia Ryder, an Odysseus with a lip full of Zyn. The Sweet East is self-branded as a picaresque, a form that gains a bit of mileage from its hero by way of tabula rasa: characters that fill the shape of their current episode lay fertile ground for further adventure. But any notion of Lillian’s demure—or, more cynically, that her character is underwritten—is a playful calculation, one that allows her to buy enough time to hash out her next move. The Pizzagate debocale lands Lillian in the company of a gaggle of trust-fund crust punks (think Antifa, née Repo Man) who lack the political savvy that may have otherwise lent their agita purpose. Lillian renders herself a wallflower here, dodging explosive tempers and Prince-Albert piercings until she can safely tell the gang’s leader (Earl Cave) to fuck off.
Lillian repeats her strategy in the next episode, which sees her in the care of a Nabokovian white supremacist named Lawrence (a stellar Simon Rex). Lawrence is perhaps the best sample slide of The Sweet East’s paradoxical capacity for both pin-pricking contemporality and an alien timelessness. He is a font of far-right rhetoric, a disarmingly handsome face that obsesses over Poe and D.W. Griffith and the pros of a white ethnostate. He is also exceedingly kind and suspiciously respectful toward Lillian (who wisely adopts a winking nom de plume in his presence) and refuses to cross the boundaries she enacts at their meeting, however dubious his long game may be. Lawrence sees The Sweet East at its strongest. Pinkerton’s dialogue gallops with Rex in the saddle; a single sentence kicks off with joy before sticking the landing in fury and makes you laugh through full ride. Here, too, Lillian bides her time. She is a patient and subdued listener, offering so little of her own ideology and drawing Lawrence out so convincingly that you start to wonder whether she’s falling for his vile schtick. But when Lillian sees her window, she takes it—along with a duffle bag full of cold, hard, white-supremacist cash.
It’s one thing to armchair quarterback a nation as unwieldy as present-day America, it’s another to predict its pratfalls. The Sweet East’s satire is almost preternaturally sharp, so much so that Williams and Pinkerton were forced to pivot on certain elements that seemed to play out via news cycles before they could block their shots. A scene that sees a film set erupt in violence needed rewrites after Alec Baldwin’s tragic missteps on the set of Rust; a coke-snorting, right-wing muppet financier of the same metamovie felt too on the nose after the filmmakers scored funding from an aide to Peter Thiel. The movie is equally prescient in its casting, snagging a handful of rising stars before their price tags outweighed indies of The Sweet East’s caliber. Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris play self-effacing, ultrahip NYC directors, Jacob Elordi riffs on a post-Twilight Robert Pattinson, Rish Shah is a fundamentalist cult member on a compound with his EDM-loving brothers.
That combination of trendsetting casting and muscled observation speaks to The Sweet East’s intersection of craft and taste-making. Williams and Pinkerton operate on the periphery of a Dimes Square–adjacent circle of Cool Kids that may have seen their debut fill a vase of edgelord-flavored cynicism in less capable hands. Like Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of 61st, though, there’s enough meat on the bone here to belie the vocal-fried nihilism that, fairly or not, barks the comings and goings of their extremely online social circles. For all The Sweet East has to say about the state of the nation, there’s nothing cynical or bitter about its takes. It’s easy to fret about the fall of an empire, but it’s noble to recognize our capacity to survive within a wild, wild country.
Here for a bad time, not a long time
I have a comedian friend who used to say there’s never been a more self-defeating question than, “Am I being annoying?” Frownland, the only directorial feature from writer Ronald Bronstein and the first film shot by Sean Price Williams, shouts that question until the nodules on its vocal cords burst. It’s an exposed bone of a movie, less the story of a guy who’s fallen through the cracks of society than someone dispossessed enough to beat new cracks into it, if only he could calm down enough to finish a thought.
Dore Mann plays Keith, or a version of himself as Keith, or maybe the Keith character bled into Dore enough to render either entity indistinguishable. At any rate, the man on the screen makes for a tough watch. He is a nervy bundle of tics, a guy who handles conflict by tugging at his cheeks and hair until it’s too late to say whatever it was he needed to say. You get the sense he’s used to watching families switch cars whenever he boards a train. Keith is a shmuck in a shmuck’s world, but he’s no more at home for it. He shares a shoebox New York apartment with Charles (Paul Grimstad), a human thesaurus and amateur musician who funnels the abuse he takes from the city into abusing Keith. When he isn’t working his job selling books of coupons door-to-door in Long Island, Keith does what he can to save his crumbling relationship with Laura (Mary Walls, who would later marry Bronstein), a depressed high-schooler with a knack for self-harm and alt comics. It’s not clear why Keith’s only friend, Sandy (David Sandholm), keeps him around, though it’s likely due to some tincture of guilt and fear for Keith’s wellbeing. Fatalistic and miserable forces abound in Frownland, and they take the shape of a nice-looking Jewish boy from the Bronx.
And yet, miraculously, Frownland is not a miserable movie. There is no Coen-flavored misanthropy here, and an ounce of contempt for its characters would topple the movie like a toy diorama. We’re quickly losing empathy as a practice to empathy as a branding device for consulting firms and car insurance ads, but Frownland reverts human understanding to something less easily marketable (i.e., covered in snot). You can chalk a good deal of that up to Dore Mann’s performance; Keith wriggles in Mann’s colon and oozes from his pores. He’s annoying enough that when Sandy wrestles him down a flight of stairs, or when Laura slams a thumbtack into his arm, you wish you could have done it yourself. But then, too: his body racks and shudders on the hunt for words to console his lonely girlfriend, he’ll let the power go out before he kicks his cruel roommate to the curb, he haunts Sandy’s apartment as if compelled by brotherly admiration. Keith is a character study as intimate and revolting as a weeping bedsore, and by the time Frownland rolls credits, it’s hard to shake the feeling you’ve just endured a nauseous bit of autobiography.
DIY movies often feel personal, but some are caked in the grime of overworked fingers. Frownland’s production was as shoestring and independent as indie movies get. According to an oral history by writer Michael Chaiken, Ronald Bronstein dreamed up Frownland’s concept to spite his fellow students at NYU and shot it over half a decade, whenever he could drum up the cash to cover another reel of 16mm film. He found Dore Mann at a shiva for a mutual relative. Mary Bronstein answered an ad looking for actors who liked Peanuts comics and Robert Altman movies. Sean Price Williams joined the crew after selling a cast member a bootleg copy of a Godard documentary on VHS. Bronstein tapped Marc Raybin as a producer because, for whatever reason, movies seemed to need producers. By all accounts, everyone made each other miserable. It feels less accurate to call Frownland a labor of love than an output of compulsion, but the tree bore fruit. Both Bronstein and Williams went on to shape a new decade of indie movies through their work with the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast would help propel the career of the director of goddamn Barbie, and Dore Mann considers Frownland’s production to be one of the happiest times of his life. And at the center of it all is an artist who believed that living in a world intent on burying you under a pile of shit still means being alive.
Sample Draws
For the past five years, I’ve made a tradition of reading a volume of My Struggle by ingenious Norwegian grump Karl Ove Knausgård every January. The fifth volume may be my favorite so far. It’s a formidable salve against nostalgia for your twenties, a true-to-form collection of brutally revealing and hyperspecific memories of a hard-drinking, wannabe writer with a lot to figure out.
I completed my run through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life with Arabian Nights over the past weekend. It’s as characteristically bold, inflammatory, and occasionally sloppy as any of the three movies. It puts Babylon’s budget-to-cock ratio to shame.
Sorry in advance, but I’ll continue to plug I Tried Calling until its release, and likely for sometime afterward. It’s a collection of short stories written by my best bud Austin Abbott (I had the privilege of editing the full volume). You can preorder the book here and its accompanying audio project here.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the next installment.