Junk review – David Schwimmer is lost in Mubi’s frustrating LA-set misstep

You could be forgiven, upon watching the first scene of Junk, for believing that this debut feature will boldly, perhaps ill-advisedly, dare to satirize the industry it’s purporting to join. At a swanky restaurant in LA, four people aglow with self-importance embark on the time-honored ritual of discussing the screenplays they’re working on – specifically, the screenplay Martin (David Schwimmer), is “working on”. It’s classic industry navel-gazing, underscored by a tight focus on Martin’s clammy face as he sputters poorly through a confidence game.

Schwimmer, of course, is still best known for playing a perpetually and comedically exasperated sitcom character; it’s hard to square that extremely familiar voice with Martin’s dark bluster on how “drug-addled gen Zers” have “no respect for the communal aspect of the cinema”, an off-putting rant that is also a tad intriguing – who is more pretentious here, the sweaty character or the picture starkly sending him up?

But Junk, directed by Jack Begert from a script co-written with Dani Goffstein, swerves quickly and, for too long, inexplicably to a different stratum of Hollywood. Somewhere else in the city, two burnouts, played by Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder, find themselves without their car, pills or plans once a house robbery goes awry. The sharp pivot is confusing, though not unwelcome; Begert, a prolific director of surrealist music videos for artists such as Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat and Kendrick Lamar, has an eye for LA’s seedy beauty, the way a night can unwind like the city’s endless roads. You could, like the chihuahua nicked from the house and hot potatoed while the thieves flee to the scene to the modest synths of Caroline Polachek’s So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, just be along for the ride.

Alas, it’s a bumpy and unsatisfying one. Junk is molded from another feature by a different name, Little Death, that premiered at the Sundance film festival back in 2024. According to press notes, that earlier movie was “a different shape entirely” from the new picture released by Mubi, though “at heart it’s the same movie.” I unfortunately missed Little Death on its festival run, where it picked up a Sundance innovator award, so I cannot speak to what, exactly, has changed, though the new shape is an odd one: two loosely connected stories of addiction and desperation in LA, one far more compelling and visually stimulating than the other, and only one deserving the film’s billing as a “slacker odyssey” across the city.

That section, as AJ (Fike) and Karla (Ryder) struggle to score and strive in nearly equal measure, beguilingly conveys, for a too brief stretch, the feeling of an unplanned evening in LA, hazy and sprawling and peopled by unpredictable characters who are at once assertive and stoned. There’s something appealing, if derivative, to lurking with two kids as they hurdle roadblock after roadblock of their own making. The appearance of Euphoria alum Fike, as another optimistic addict endearing even as he’s lying through his teeth, recalls the audacity of that now-cursed show – an impression unfortunately underscored by a visit to an antiseptic, sinister apartment owned by a drug dealer with “school shooter vibes” (an off-putting Karl Glusman) that undercuts the film’s woozy naturalism.

Unfortunate, too, that the 110-minute film’s middle section returns to Schwimmer’s screenwriter, sweatily withdrawing into fantasy with a molten core of self-loathing. The title card, presented 35 minutes in, presents an art exhibit that teases Junk as “a search for meaning in the post-post-modern dilemma” – a line surely meant as a joke, though it more or less describes the film’s grating meta ambitions, as Martin maybe or maybe not writes the other half of the story. It is, I assume, supposed to be ironic that Martin, stymied by a male protagonist deemed too “unlikable” by broadly drawn film executives, resorts to increasingly repellant behavior and flights of fancy. But whatever the intentions (and impressive flourishes of surrealist animation), it is certainly a slog to witness. The fact that, in taking the exec’s notes that he switch his protagonist to a woman in order to get made, Martin is played, for a time, by Gaby Hoffman, scans as unduly cynical. (And the less that is said about a recurring fantasy sequence involving a beautiful woman, played by Angela Sarafyan, in a barn described by his therapist as his “mother’s womb”, the better.) That Jena Malone, as Martin’s beleaguered fiancee, gets a well-earned tirade puncturing his absorption is only fair, though of little comfort.

If this sounds like the review of two entirely different movies – well, though connections between the two are eventually revealed, Junk never coheres into one picture. There’s admirable ambition here, and plenty of sumptuous visuals to spare, but the clash between one section’s biting cynicism and another’s ragged heart proves too discordant to overcome. Which is a shame; as a whole, the film may be a mess, but there are little treasures within this Junk to perhaps be reimagined down the road.

• Junk is now available globally on Mubi now