In the virtually abandoned city of Lost River, Billy (Hendricks) lives with her sons: toddler Franky (Stewart) and teen Bones (De Caestecker). When Billy is shown no mercy by new bank manager Dave (Mendelsohn), she takes his offer of a job at a freaky cabaret club alongside Cat (Mendes). Meanwhile, Bones does his part by scavenging copper from vacant buildings, which puts him at odds with self-proclaimed gangster Bully (Smith) and his sidekick Face (Wigfield). The girl next door, Rat (Ronan), tries to help, but is preoccupied with caring for her delusional grandmother (Steele).

This is a lurid fairy tale, a collision of David Lynch and John Waters by way of Terrence Malick. Gosling uses fire, water, blood and decay to add plenty of texture. And the actors build intensity with emotionally edgy performances. Hendricks and De Caestecker both capture a superb sense of desperation, trying to hold their depleted family together in a society destroyed by economic blight. The other standouts are Smith as the grandstanding thug and Mendelsohn as a creep with a penchant for song and dance.

The problem is that without a coherent plot nothing these people face resonates. The metaphor of a nearby town flooded when the river was dammed is overused and underworked, especially as it includes a buried dinosaur theme park that adds a Loch Ness kick but never quite resolves into anything meaningful. The same problem extends to the indulgent character names and each of the plot threads, leaving Rat's story dangling like a random reference to both Great Expectations and Sunset Blvd.

But then most of the film feels like it refers to something else, from the purple glow of the nightclub's bizarro catacombs to Bully's lair in an abandoned zoo. Gosling beautifully depicts the mood of each scene, using darkly colourful imagery that evokes all kinds of bleak emotion. He has clearly learned a lot from stylish directors he's worked with like Nicolas Winding Refn and Derek Cianfrance, and he knows his film-history iconography. But next time he should also tell a story.

themes, language, violence

7.Apr.15