Jack Begert arrives with a music-video director's eye and a structural problem he never solves. Junk opens on a Los Angeles restaurant, four self-important people, and David Schwimmer doing something genuinely odd: playing a clammy, pretentious screenwriter named Martin who rants about drug-addled Gen Zers having no respect for the communal aspect of cinema. It's a promising opening — the question of whether Martin or the film itself is more pretentious hangs in the air like a good joke about to land. Then the film pivots, 35 minutes of story away, to AJ and Karla — played by Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder — a pair of burnouts who lose their car, their pills, and their plans after a house robbery goes badly. The shift is disorienting in the moment and rewarding in retrospect, because this half of the film is alive in ways the other isn't. Begert's feel for LA's nocturnal drift — the hazy unspooling of an unplanned evening, the city's endless roads, the succession of unpredictable strangers — comes through cleanly here. Fike, in particular, carries the optimistic-addict register with the same audacity that made Euphoria compelling before it collapsed under its own weight. The film's problems live in Martin's half. When the story returns to Schwimmer's screenwriter — sweatily withdrawing into fantasy, guided by a therapist toward his "mother's womb" in a recurring barn sequence — the picture's grating meta-ambitions announce themselves. A title card, presented 35 minutes in, frames Junk as "a search for meaning in the post-post-modern dilemma." This is, presumably, ironic. It doesn't read as ironic. Martin's arc — a male protagonist told by executives that his lead is too unlikable, so he rewrites it as a woman, played briefly by Gaby Hoffman — scans as unduly cynical rather than sharp. Jena Malone, as Martin's fiancée, gets a well-earned tirade at his absorption. It is fair. It is also insufficient relief from the slog. Junk began life as a Sundance 2024 debut called Little Death, which picked up an innovator award before Mubi acquired and reshaped it into its current form. The press notes acknowledge the film is now "a different shape entirely" while being "at heart the same movie." The seams show. What reads as two loosely connected stories of addiction and desperation in LA — one formally adventurous and one formally exhausting — were presumably tighter in their earlier configuration. Whether the restructuring created the incoherence or merely exposed it is unknowable without Little Death as a reference point. The 110-minute runtime contains genuine pleasures. Begert's cinematography finds seedy beauty in LA interiors with the confidence of someone who has spent years making images for Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat, and Kendrick Lamar. Caroline Polachek's So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings soundtracks a chihuahua hot-potato sequence that captures the film's best impulse: absurdist momentum over meaning. The surrealist animation flourishes in Martin's sequences are impressive on their own terms. Karl Glusman's drug-dealer with "school shooter vibes" is genuinely unsettling in a way that cuts against the woozy naturalism Begert has otherwise built — an intrusion of a different film's register into this one. The core failure is tonal and structural rather than technical. The AJ-and-Karla section earns the billing as a slacker odyssey; Martin's section earns a different label that the film is too cautious to commit to. Biting meta-cynicism and ragged human warmth are not irreconcilable — Altman managed it, Cassavetes managed it — but they require a through-line the script doesn't provide. The connections eventually revealed between the two halves are present without being load-bearing. Begert is a real filmmaker. The formal vocabulary is there, the eye is there, and Fike is a genuine screen presence who deserved a complete film built around him. Junk contains the bones of something better. That the bones are interesting does not make the body functional.
