‘Hot Summer Nights’ on Amazon Prime: Timothée Chalamet Deals Drugs on Cape Cod

With the sudden success of Timothée Chalamet last year — delivering an indelible and unforgettable performance in Call Me By Your Name, earning his first Oscar nomination, getting meme-d like crazy in both CMBYN and Lady Bird — the temptation is to think that he came from out of nowhere. Which is of course no true. He was on that one season of Homeland, actually getting in on that cast’s SAG nomination for best TV ensemble. He was also so impressive in the Lily Rabe indie character study Miss Stevens.

In that context, Hot Summer Nights is a bit of an artifact. Based off a script that had made the Blacklist of Hollywood’s top unproduced screenplays in 2013 and filmed in the late summer of 2015, the film stars Chalamet as a Cape Cod townie who gets mixed up in dealing drugs to the vacation destination’s summer residents (and their kids) in the summer of 1991. Playing the good-guy-going-bad thing feels perfect for Chalamet in principle, but you get the impression that the film doesn’t fully trust him to carry the narrative on his own.

There’s a lot of flash in the filmmaking here. Writer-director Elijah Bynum is making his debut here, and he certainly knows how to keep an audience on its toes. The best moments are when we get Chalamet alone or in close quarters with his co-stars (It Follows actress Maika Monroe plays his love interest), but those moments more often than not get bowled over by drug-fueled montages or flashbacks or visual razzle-dazzle. I’m not fully sure Hot Summer Nights knew what it had in Timothée Chalamet, and I’d be very interested to see what this movie might have turned out like if it were filmed after his Oscar nomination.

The narrative of Hot Summer Nights is split in two, with Chalamet taking up half and the other half ceded to an affected bad-boy character named Hunter, played by newcomer Alex Roe. And while Chalamet is looking 1991 perfect in his rugby shirts and backwards ballcaps, there is a whole lot of heavy dramatics placed on this Hunter. Here’s where the movie gets disappointingly mundane, and where Chalamet’s light disappointingly dims.

A movie called Hot Summer Nights starring Timothée Chalamet, set on Cape Cod in the early ’90s — literally nothing could have seemed more up my own particular alley. Maybe yours too. As a peek into the pre-fame version of Chalamet, it’s a worthy artifact, even if it falls well short of the movie you had thought up in your head.

Where to stream Hot Summer Nights