Revolving around the intersecting fates of three Tampa dwellers — a fresh-faced ingenue, the hustler who seduces her and an ex-convict readjusting to life on the outside — writer-director Tyler Riggs’ feature debut has a ripe, palpable sense of place and a pair of magnetic leads in Nisalda Gonzalez and Matthew Leone as the young lovers.
Meanwhile, an attempt to impose some greater cosmic meaning on the story via Brandon’s drawling, fortune-cookie-philosophical voiceover is a glaring rookie mistake — a lack of trust in the movie’s images to speak for themselves.
The Sunshine State, with its boldly colored natural beauty and blindingly sun-baked, strip-mall ugliness in often jarring proximity, has occupied a particular space in American independent cinema: Films from Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise and Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass to Spring Breakers, Moonlight, The Florida Project, The Beach Bum and Waves tell tales of ecstasy and struggle, romantic rapture and seedy criminality, befitting a land of extremes and incongruities.
The usual influences are there, but the filmmaker conjures mood without drifting into Malickian mannerisms, tracks his subjects’ movements without over-reliance on handheld, Dardennes-style stalking and makes purposeful use of facial close-ups without leaving us pining for Barry Jenkins.
Rosie’s sleepy summer routine gets a shake-up when she starts hanging with Jules , a slightly older drug dealer from New York.
While there’s nothing new in the film’s good-girl-meets-bad-boy-cue-heartbreak template, the scenes of Rosie and Jules together shimmer with sensuality and an organic-feeling flirtatiousness.
The performance also grows more interesting as the movie progresses, the actor hinting at currents of self-loathing and insecurity raging just below the surface swagger.
The two pull us close and keep us guessing, as does Benitez as Nino, Rosie’s loving but controlling father; their relationship is drawn in bracingly unsentimental strokes, while Nino’s interactions with Jules have a gripping, slow-boil tension.
We see him moving in with an elderly relative, meeting with his parole officer, working as a pool cleaner for a woman whose sexual advances trigger his PTSD — material that might have made its own fine film but isn’t pertinently interwoven here.
The film’s title is a tongue-in-cheek nickname for Florida alluding to its high proportion of senior citizens.