Stream It or Skip It: ‘How to Talk to Girls at Parties’ on VOD, a Teen Punk Romance About Aliens, At Last

John Cameron Mitchell, the writer/director/performer behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus, and Rabbit Hole, is back with How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a wildly out-there romantic comedy about a bunch of punk kids in the ’70s who encounter a collective of travelers who seem like Euro art queers at first blush but who are really a race of oddly-dressed, sexually interesting aliens. It’s a sensibility that fits well with Mitchell’s general artistic vibe, though the story’s self-conscious strangeness threatens to have it all go floating away before the audience can fully grasp it.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1977. A trio of punk teen boys attend an after-party where they meet a cadre of aloof, unusual young women. One of them, Zann (Elle Fanning) takes a shine to one of the boys, Enn (Alex Sharp); she and her house-mates are deeply strange, costumed in PVC body suits with weird tall hair buns. Obviously the boys conclude they must be American. Or, like, Swedish. Someplace far away and weird. Turns out, the girls are all part of a traveling race of aliens whose periodic trips to Earth are treated like intergalactic class trips, with their “parent/teachers” as chaperones. As you might imagine, Enn falls for Zann, and in falling in love with him, Zann embraces her temporary humanity, soaks up the energy of the youth around her and the punk scene and the general vibe of being alive, and she likes it. But her alien customs remain, the most vexing of which is that the alien children as customarily consumed (eaten) by their parent/teachers before they return home.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There are a lot of influences at work here, from the queer kinetic energy of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine and the punk-ier aspects of Hedwig to quirky alien sex comedies like Earth Girls Are Easy and certain parts of Dude, Where’s My Car? John Cameron Mitchell swirls this all around, with influences bleeding into one another. It never quite reaches the level of anarchy, for better or for worse, but it sometimes feel like the aesthetics are directing Mitchell and not the other way around.

Performance Worth Watching: Ruth Wilson (The Affair) plays one of the parent-teacher aliens and, after a turn in the story, gets to play an incredibly amusing crisis of purpose. She’s wonderful. And Alex Sharpp, who I thought was so impressive in last year’s Netflix movie To the Bone, does solid work as the film’s lead (though perhaps never quite selling me on his punk bona fides). But when Nicole Kidman gets to strut on screen as a punk empress named Queen Boadicea, acting as den mother to young punks and their weird alien girlfriends alike, it’s tough not to toss your hands up in applause.

Memorable Dialogue: “Weren’t you a virus last time?” asks unfortunate alien Wain’s Wain, who manifested this time with an error that’s malformed her fingers. She’s pretty blasé about it, but she mistakes Enn for another alien and wonders what he manifested as the last time they all passed through Earth.

Single Best Shot: To the film’s detriment, the Enn/Zann romance is among the weaker aspects of the movie. Their initial attraction seems perfunctory, their connection doesn’t feel nearly strong enough to be able to transmit to the audience, and the less said about the copulation scene when both characters become amorphous colored blobs of CGI screen-saver art, ripped from the pages of the kind of music videos Peter Gabriel would be making today if he were making music videos today. That said, the scene in the punk club where Zann takes the stage and lets her inner songstress out is the one moment here where their storyline breaks free of everything else weighing it down. There’s energy and abandon in these scenes.

Sex and Skin: Stick with me here, but there’s a very hot scene featuring Enn’s best pal Vic (an up-for-anything Abraham Lewis), a pair of aliens, a sling, and an anal probe, and even if that doesn’t sound like it would turn out hot, guess what? It totally does. It also marks an avenue that might have been fun for Mitchell to follow down. Not to make the claim that queerness is always more interesting that non-queerness, how amazing would this movie have been if it were centrally about a straight human learning to love two male- and female-presenting aliens? The film revisits this very briefly, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s an opportunity missed.

Our Take: There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could’ve been peek out. They’re in the scene with Kidman having a tense/sexy stand-off with Ruth Wilson. They’re in Elle Fanning performing on a stage. They’re in the moments when this punk scene feels one with cosmic history in the way that only a John Cameron Mitchell film can do. They’re fleeting, here, but they’re worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Our Call: Stream It

Where to stream How to Talk to Girls at Parties