A main character who's entitled and unlikable makes Funny Pages tough to enjoy, even if it successfully captures a particular comics subculture.
Thanks to the success of superhero movies, comic books have attained a level of coolness far greater than in decades past, but the comic books that the characters in A24's Funny Pages read and create are not that kind of cool. Although he's only 17, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) has the tastes of someone much older, and his inspirations as a comic book creator are people like R. Crumb and Peter Bagge, not anyone who works for Marvel or DC. He's clearly talented, but he's also an entitled, off-putting snob, which makes Funny Pages tough to enjoy, even if it successfully captures a particular subculture.
Writer-director Owen Kline himself is influenced by the work of creators like Crumb and Bagge, as well as the filmmaking Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems, Good Time), who serve as executive producers on Funny Pages. The movie is deliberately abrasive, and Kline isn't interested in making his main character likable. Like Kline himself, who's the son of Hollywood stars Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, Robert is a child of privilege, growing up in the upper-middle-class security of Princeton, New Jersey. His well-meaning parents (Josh Pais and Maria Dizzia) want him to go to college, even if that means going to art school, but Robert has a romanticized notion of suffering for his art, which he pursues with self-destructive stubbornness.
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He's further pushed to the margins after his beloved art teacher dies in a car accident that the movie plays for morbid laughs. Without his mentor and with a new sense of life's brevity, Robert decides to drop out of high school and move out of his family's comfortable suburban home. He works two jobs: one as a clerk at a rather unwelcoming comic-book store and another taking notes for a public defender. He acquires an old, crumbling car and rents a room in an obviously illegal basement apartment alongside a pair of creepy middle-aged roommates. He makes a series of terrible decisions that he sees as necessary to live the life of an artist.
Funny Pages has the vague structure of a coming-of-age story, but Robert never matures or develops, and he's not complex or interesting enough to carry the short movie. Kline populates Funny Pages with various oddball characters who look like they could have stepped out of a Crumb or Bagge comic book, and there are some amusingly strange supporting performances. Searching for a new mentor, Robert gravitates toward Wallace (Matthew Maher), a clearly unhinged client in the public defender's office who's been charged with assault. Wallace is also a former color separator for Image Comics, which is the closest that Robert has ever gotten to a comics professional.
The volatile dynamic between Robert and Wallace occupies most of Funny Pages' second half, and it quickly grows repetitive and tiresome. Robert pesters Wallace for art lessons that Wallace clearly isn't equipped to offer and for connections that Wallace clearly no longer has. Wallace, in turn, berates and yells at Robert, only to backtrack when he realizes he might get some money or support out of the arrangement. A sequence in which Wallace convinces Robert to spy on and provoke the man accusing Wallace of assault is an excruciating exercise in cringe comedy with meager payoff.
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There's some humor in the interactions between Robert and the weirdos in his life, all of whom are fodder for his comics, for which artist Johnny Ryan provides the actual art. Funny Pages is a rougher, more cantankerous version of underground comics-based movies like Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World or the Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor. However, it feels less like a movie based on one of those comics and more like a movie that a character from one of those comics would make themselves -- the kind of grimy, disreputable glimpse into a twisted mind that most people would recoil from.
Getting that kind of glimpse is part of the appeal for many of the comics that Robert likes, and it can be the appeal for movies by the Safdies as well. Shooting on 16mm film, Kline approximates the feel of genuine outsider cinema, but his story is the equivalent of Robert's journey into self-induced poverty. It feels like the posturing of someone who's immersed in an artistic scene but never quite part of it. Just taking a tour through this artistic underbelly isn't enough, and Funny Pages falters when Kline attempts to give it some narrative structure.
That's especially true at the end when the story runs out of places to go, and Kline resorts to the indie-movie cliché of sudden violence to artificially raise the stakes. Just hanging out with these characters is unpleasant enough -- there doesn't need to be the added threat of actual injury. Like Robert, Funny Pages is enamored with danger and edginess but ends up with little to offer as an artistic statement.
Funny Pages opens Friday, Aug. 26 in select theaters and on VOD.
Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He's the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and has written about movies and pop culture for Vulture, Polygon, Inverse, Film Racket, Crooked Marquee and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year. Follow him on Twitter at @signalbleed and on Facebook at Josh Bell Hates Everything.
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