On a recent weeknight at the IFC Center in Manhattan’s West Village, staff members corralled a 400-person crowd in and out of the doors while swarms circled the lead actors of the sold-out feature playing that night: “Dinner in America.” The film — an angsty rom-com that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 but struggled to find distribution before being self-released in 2022 — has catapulted from crickets to cult status since going viral on TikTok in the past couple of months. Seizing on a rare encore, the filmmakers have rallied fans to support a shot at the theatrical run they never had.
“You don’t get second chances in this business,” the film’s writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier told the audience during a post-screening Q&A. The surprise comeback began around September when an inexplicable bump in TikTok’s algorithm turbo-blasted the movie and its earworm original song, “Watermelon.” Soon after, the film was trending across Hulu (where it is currently streaming), Letterboxd and Google. The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, Calif., was one of the first theaters to announce a screening, selling out in less than 24 hours. The nonprofit cinema said the requests for “Dinner in America” were the most they’d received for any film.
The plot follows the unlikely musical and sexual chemistry between Simon (Kyle Gallner) and Patty (Emily Skeggs). He’s an on-the-lam, slick crust punk; she’s a mousy 20-year-old whose parents keep her away from strobe lights and on five different medications. She finds refuge from bullies and suburban stupor by mailing Polaroid nudes and love poems to her favorite hardcore band’s ski-masked lead singer, who, coincidentally, is Simon.
When “Dinner in America” was released for a limited theatrical run, as well as on demand, in 2022, The New York Times gave it a mixed review. The critic Concepción de León wrote that the movie “delivers on surprise and explosiveness, but much of its offensive language, both racist and homophobic, feels gratuitous in a film that might have otherwise landed as an offbeat love story.”
But content creators have been lifting up the film. The screenwriter Nic Curcio pitched the film to his TikTok followers as the “love child of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ and Todd Solondz” after noticing the uptick beyond the usual MovieTok nerds. Those millions of viewers, he told The Times, are probably sitting alone in their rooms: “The screening elements bring this whole phenomenon full circle.” The film’s success on social media meant it wouldn’t have to wait decades to achieve an underground cachet.
“When you have an algorithm feeding you movies that they think you’ll like, it’s a lot harder to randomly come across some weird movie that you’ve never heard of that’s going to change your life,” BJ Colangelo, a writer who caught “Dinner in America” during its early festival run and commemorated it with a tattoo, said in a phone interview. “It does feel like this is what a cult film looks like in 2024.”
The film’s stars, Gallner and Skeggs, wake up daily to online praise for their refreshingly homespun take on the weird-girlfriend-psycho-boyfriend trope. “Even though these characters are so heightened, there is this odd relatability,” Gallner said over Zoom, even if their “gnarly love story” and us-against-the-world anthem are rooted in a dark reality. Gallner, a that-guy actor fresh off recent roles in “Strange Darling” and “Smile 2,” has also used social media platforms to encourage screenings. He drew from his youth as a chaos agent in mosh pits and skate parks for the role. “I got in trouble all the time and finding a place to put it sometimes was hard,” he said, adding that acting was a good place to start.
For Skeggs, best known for her Tony-nominated role as Medium Alison in the Broadway musical “Fun Home,” Patty was a healing, albeit daunting, role. Though many assume the character is neurodivergent, omitting labels was intentional. “We don’t get the opportunity as humans walking around the world to encounter a person and say, ‘I can see what they are and that’s going to inform how I interact with them,’” Skeggs said. “I’ll say from my own personal experience, as a child, I was put on a medication for a long time that had me hallucinating,” she continued, underscoring the film’s themes of over-medication and misdiagnosis.
The production of “Dinner in America,” which was shot in 2018 outside of Detroit, mimicked the plot’s DIY-or-die thrust. Cobbling together a low budget, Rehmeier, who also edited the feature to save money, wrote the theme song, “Watermelon,” with Skeggs. For all its singularity and punch, the indie film left Sundance in 2020 without a buyer. Ross Putnam, a producer on the film, recalled back-and-forth talks with distributors that went nowhere. The film arrived 10 years too late, he was told, and studios and streamers weren’t taking chances on smaller fringe films like they once did. “Word of mouth in the history of independent film is how we succeed,” Putnam said, and today, that’s done on TikTok.
The grass-roots campaign to bring the film back to theaters made the success taste that much sweeter. “This is like the victory lap,” Gallner said. “The people have spoken.” Repertory and art-house cinemas — themselves enjoying a cult revival scene — have added “Dinner in America” to their slates across the country, and its theatrical run continues at IFC Center in Manhattan this week. “We put extreme limitations on ourselves, thinking this theatrical window thing happens, and then this thing dies,” said Rehmeier, whose other foul-mouthed, coming-of-age flick, “Snack Shack,” came out in theaters earlier this year.
At the IFC Center screening, among the young cinephiles in Doc Martens, Jennifer Hall, 64, handed out Dum-Dums, a reference both to the movie’s song (“Like a tongue-tongue, in my ear drum dumb-dumb”) and a lollipop scene featuring a moony needle drop from Mac DeMarco’s “My Kind of Woman.” Like most, Hall was there because she had heard the movie’s siren call via TikTok fan edits. “If I had just seen the trailer, I wouldn’t have watched it,” she said.
Ahead of a 10th viewing of the film, the first on the big screen, Buffy Meléndez, 22, grabbed a lollipop. Meléndez said that as a person with autism, they felt that the film represented their experience and the way “this world infantilizes you.” Meléndez added, “Simon comes into Patty’s life and shows her, and, more importantly, shows everyone else, that Patty is capable of being an independent adult.” Meléndez’s boyfriend, Paul Riggio, 25, nodded. He could relate to both the lead characters’ love story and family dysfunction. “I have dealt with a lot of dinners in America,” he said.
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