By Dwight Casimere
Director Michelle Danner gives a glossy Beverly Hills 90210 look to a very gritty subject; teen drug trafficking. A prolific director, author and world-renowned acting coach with several film projects in the hopper, Danner even makes a cameo appearance as the mother of a teen-aged girl, Layla, (a whimsical Kerri Medders), whose mind nearly gets erased by sniffing some bad drugs.
French actor Edouard Philipponnat, best known for last year’s House of Gucci from Ridley Scott, gives the film’s most credible performance as Aiden, the high school track star who moonlights as the local school drug dealer.
Entrapped by the police into becoming an informant, his conflicted journey is the driving force of the film. Adding to his anguish is his turbulent relationship with his widowed, put-upon mom, Miranda (veteran German-American actress Elisabeth Rohm). Aiden finds he is increasingly entangled in a web of deceit constructed by the ambitious Detective
Wall, played by Cameron Douglas. If the actor looks and sounds a lot like a young Michael Douglas, that is because he is the legendary actor’s son, whose struggles with drug addiction is the subject of his best-selling memoir Long Way Home from Knopf Publishing.
Nadji Jeter is Blake, Aiden’s ride-or-die friend who is the conduit to the film’s violent denouement. The familiar face of TV actor Eric Balfour appears as the smack talking drug kingpin Local Legend, referred to as ‘LL’ in the film, who is the target of Det. Wall’s haywire drug sting.
Director Danner weaves several drug-fueled flashbacks into the plot scheme, punctuated by the Layla character reprising the schmaltzy tune, ‘Look For The Silver Lining.’ The song acts as an eerily jarring counterpoint to the raw events that unfold against the otherwise glittering scenario of rich kids with too much money and far too much freedom. (Noticeably, Aiden drives a top-of-the-line Mercedes SUV and casually walks away from a Porsche 911 that he’s crash landed in someone’s driveway). There are some tender scenes between Aiden and Layla, which lend an element of humanity and some welcome levity to their otherwise bleak emotional existence.
Written by Jason Chase Tyrrell (Ghost House, Bad Impulse), the film has suspenseful music by Holly Amber (the ‘Scream Queen’ of horror movies), glittering photography by Pierluigi Malavasi (Miranda’s Victim, with Donald Sutherland and Luke Wilson)
and fast-paced editing by Teferi Seifu Church (director Danner’s long-time collaborator). The film is a bit uneven and predictable in spots, but it delivers the goods as a modern cautionary tale aimed at today’s Generation Z.
