Sundance: A Little Cold, A Little Sad, but the Movies Are Still Pretty Solid

Arrestingly frigid weather at the Sundance Film Festival, with temperatures as low as 8 degrees and a dump of ski-ready snow over the weekend, befits an emotionally cool reception this year in Park City. It’s the final stages of a slow-motion breakup, in a Utah resort town that is officially saying farewell to the event it has hosted since 1981.

Later this spring, Sundance announces a new home—finalists include Salt Lake City, Boulder, and Cincinnati—and Robert Redford’s relocated indie institution will begin anew in 2027. Next year’s Sundance will be the final edition in Park City, which means that this penultimate edition has had a strangely valedictorian vibe. Hotels and condos remain obscenely expensive, parking lots have more aggressive tow-truck penalties, most midnight screenings start at 9:30pm, and the overwhelming police presence is hardly welcoming.

Even the year-round local multiplex, the Holiday Village, which shuttered last year, is temporarily reopen as a venue—the carcass of a once-thriving business now a literal shell briefly reanimated for the week. Call it the Long Goodbye: the fest hasn’t left yet, but it’s definitely not here to stay.

And yet that indie spirit remains: despite an overall chill, Sundance has still unveiled a promising bumper crop of hot-blooded filmmaking. This year’s offerings show spiky human beings at their most vulnerable, most aspirational, most disillusioned, and most resilient: from idealistic rock legends and downtown hipster icons to sociopathic antiheroes, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and an idiot dying of preventable cancer.

Day One kicked off with the world premiere of Sly Lives! aka the Burden of Black Genius, as well as the U.S. premiere of One to One: John & Yoko—a pair of time-capsule music docs whose come-together themes worked in apposite harmony.

Sly Lives! is Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Summer of Soul, deep-diving into the astounding career of protean musician and San Francisco DJ-turned-producer Sylvester Stewart—who rechristened himself Sly Stone and eventually transformed the rock world with his multi-ethnic, multi-gender band Sly and the Family Stone. His wildly influential rise, spectacular success, and over-too-soon drug-fueled flameout, spanning the late 1960s to mid-1970s, is all too familiar.

But musicologist Questlove makes the story an exegetical revelation. Witness his deconstruction of “Dance to the Music,” with every musical instrument getting its own time to shine; or how the melodies in “Stand!” travel the musical scales like a rollercoaster before exploding into an entirely different beat-driven construct. He interweaves musicology into the chronological beats of Sly’s hippie-funk personal and professional journey with riveting results. Hulu has streaming rights, and will debut the film on February 13.

One to One is another beast entirely, an inspired documentary reconstruction of the first 18 months that John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent in New York, from late 1971 to early 1973, living like college kids in a two-room Greenwich Village apartment while they figured out their post-Beatles life. Director Kevin Macdonald and co-director Sam Rice-Edwards use the rock stars’ One to One benefit concert as a framing device, along with countless archival TV clips from ads, game shows, talk shows, news programs—all the pop culture flotsam and jetsam that the two lovers absorbed like sponges.

The movie literally reconstructs the lovers’ flat with ghostly precision, particularly the church-pew bedframe and the boob tube parked at its foot, evoking with tactile precision the environs that nurtured their artistic development. And in doing so, from the upheaval in Vietnam to the 1972 presidential election, from collaborations with Allen Ginsberg to art exhibitions involving live flies, the filmmakers conjure the climate that feeds not only Lennon’s musical artistry but his political activism. Magnolia Pictures will release the quasi-concert film on April 11 exclusively in IMAX.

Another wildly eerie evocation of the early ’70s is Peter Hujar’s Day, a cinematic madeleine to all downtown New York hipsters who either remember or yearn to have lived during a time when the titular photographer could pinball between encounters with Susan Sontag and Fran Leibowitz, or make his way over to the tenement flat of the aforementioned Ginsberg and get an unexpected encounter with William S. Burroughs.

On December 18, 1974, writer Linda Rosencrantz asked Hujar to detail every facet of one day in his life, tape-recording their lengthy conversation in the process. Since only a transcript exists of their encounter, Ira Sachs improbably took that material and reshaped it into a revelatory film starring Ben Wishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosencrantz. The result is a fascinating acting feat and formalist filmmaking exercise that challenges viewers as much as it seduces them into a endearingly intimate confessional between two close friends finding the infinite within the granular.

In stark contrast to the Hujar/Rosencrantz duo in Peter Hujar’s Day, two other premieres—Twinless and Lurker—show how friendships are nothing but fraught, and sociopathic power plays define the dynamics. James Sweeney writes, directs and stars in Twinless, a shrewdly funny and deeply sad film in which Dylan O’Brien plays a dim-witted twin named Roman whose smarter gay brother Rocky (also O’Brien) dies unexpectedly.

Desperate for solace, Roman goes to a counseling group where other twins have lost their genetic siblings, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Denis (Sweeney). But Denis has secrets of his own that complicate their relationship—especially when Roman falls for one of Denis’ co-workers. Rife with clever plot twists and cringeworthy moments of emotional duplicity, Twinless plays like a queer rom-com with shades of Vertigo while delivering unexpectedly wise insights into the need for connection.

That same yearning curdles fast in Lurker, a shocking look at how the intertwining of emotional connection and professional aspiration can get downright twisted. Written and directed by Alex Russell, whose c.v. includes writing for intense dramedies like The Bear and Beef, Lurker follows clothing-store employee Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) and his unnervingly successful attempts to penetrate the inner circle of a rising pop star named Oliver (Archie Madekwe).

Joining the entourage isn’t enough, especially when Oliver is constantly reappraising who stays or goes in his surrogate family. So Matthew makes himself useful, then essential—and finally intractable. The evolution of Matthew’s machinations are jaw-dropping enough; but what makes Lurker so riveting is how Russell’s script keeps turning the power plays inside out, shifting the limits of control from one person to another, with increasingly jaw-dropping results.

No good deed goes unpunished, especially when the innocuous lives of well-meaning but unsuspecting people get blindsided by life. Mary Bronstein’s intense feminist dramedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a loving but overextended working mother whose Naval husband is away at sea for weeks at a time and whose daughter has health issues that require nutritional supplements fed through an abdominal tube.

Linda’s career as a therapist gets progressively sidelined when her water-damaged bedroom ceiling collapses and forces her to move into a motel indefinitely, which only ratchets up the anxiety and tension she’s feeling in every aspect of her life. A deliberately innervating film that immerses the viewer in every modulation of Linda’s anxiety, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You does not offer easy releases for its crippling tension, and gives Byrne one of the strongest and most uncompromising roles of her career.

Far funnier—and literally more fatal—is the preposterously inspiring doc André is an Idiot, Tony Benna’s lovingly irreverent portrait of his oddball friend André Ricciardi and the final years of his life suffering through stage-four colon cancer. The San Francisco ad exec and family man never bothered to get a colonoscopy, waiting over a year before have one—and then ironically realized that if he had listened to his friend and gotten that check-up earlier, he’d have easily survived the disease.

Instead, he got a death sentence. And so the buoyant André calls up his friend Tony and tells him he wants to make a funny movie about his own chemo-ridden, body-ravaged end. Believe it or not, the film is hilariously, heartbreakingly effective. André Is an Idiot becomes a beautifully frank testament to the human spirit, to stoicism, to facing fears and to coming to terms with your own shortcomings. What better way to embody the ethos of Sundance than a film that shines a light on peoples’ unexamined lives? André might have even called it probing.