J Paul Johnson
Who knew Dirty Laundry could be so fun? Or, for that matter, insightful? A late-night laundromat is the single setting of writer-director Rocky Walls’ sprightly feature, premiering this week at the Heartland International Film Festival. Its charismatic leads and comic tone give the film plenty of late-adolescent charm, while as its narrative proceeds and secrets unfold—as a consequence of a magical totem of sorts—the “dirty laundry” that’s aired reveals some sobering truths for two young men on the cusp of adulthood.
Set in 1997, Walls’ film begins with an extended title sequence featuring animated titles and simple hand drawings à la Gareth Smith’s for Ivan Reitman’s 2007 indie hit Juno, set here to the music of Zuma’s “Dizzy” and conveying the film’s light, lively tone. Two protagonists, both 19 and one year out of high school, are best friends and potential co-entrepreneurs. Having mutually decided to skip college, they meet up each week at their local laundromat to hone their business plan, the latest iteration of which is called “Prop Pop” and will provide photo backdrops, set dressings, and graphic design for event installations and the like. It’s not an awful idea, but it’s going to take a whole-hearted investment from both them, their design skills and business smarts, to get it off the ground.
Kyle Miller (Mitchell Wray) is the design kid, the one with a notebook stuffed with drawings, scribbles, and notes. His unruly hair scrunched up under an omnipresent wool beanie, he’s the one always quick with a quip and comfortable in a crowd, the easygoing California kid transplanted to the Midwest where he’s had to learn to make friends fast. Still feeling the pain of having lost his father, Kyle’s a dreamer, full of ideas but less savvy about what it might take to achieve them.
Eric Hernandez (Charlie Schultz) is Kyle’s best buddy, and he’s a study in contrast: where Kyle is ebullient, Eric is contemplative; where Kyle is artistic, Eric is methodical; where Kyle’s single-mom California-style upbringing is progressive, Eric’s has been strictly conservative. His hardworking Mexican immigrant father, who grew a lawn service into a successful landscape design company, has pushed Eric hard. But at 19, Eric can’t quite see himself becoming a younger version of his dad, and he also can’t quite commit fully to Kyle’s nascent business plans.
In fact, this week, Eric—at his dad’s behest—is supposed to give Kyle his decision, an emphatic, unambiguous “no.” Kyle, though, has dumped his day job as a barista and is ready to tell Eric he’s all in, 100 percent. So this week’s laundromat rendezvous has a lot riding on its soak, rinse, spin cycle. It’s here where Dirty Laundry‘s narrative takes a turn: a mysterious stranger interrupts their business-brainstorming laundry night with words of wisdom and a magic trick. And suddenly, Kyle and Eric discover they are incapable of lying. Both have reluctant truths to share and a lot at stake.
Walls, with his first fiction-film feature, does something too few films care to: draw a genuine depiction of adolescent male friendship that never kowtows to cringe nor relies on cliché. Neither his Kyle nor his Eric is a “type” you see in so many adolescent comedies. They’re simply smart, sweet kids with dreams and fears, alike enough to have forged a friendship and yet different enough for the film’s narrative to exploit their contrasts without relying on generic tropes to do so. They’re like a lot of Midwestern kids you might (or might not) know, guileless and unafraid of hard work but a unsure of themselves and what the world has in store for them.
Both Wray and Schultz are students at the Savannah College of Art and Design where they are studying film, and both shine in their respective roles. Wray has a bit more to do, being the driver of the conflict between them and generally the more ebullient of the two personalities, but Schultz is equally strong with a little less on his plate. Even when the plot turns serious and the two’s dialogue becomes an exercise in truth-telling, Wray and Schultz are consistently convincing.
Walls does well to keep the script skipping along with a few short flashbacks as the film clocks in at a quick 70 minutes. One wonders if the whole notion of there being a magical totem (delivered by a black woman, in reference to the trope Spike Lee and others have observed in so much Hollywood cinema), is necessary. The character, credited only as “Mysterious Stranger” (played by Deborah Asante) comes to the two white boys’ aid to gift them a magic coin that compels them to speak their uncomfortable—yet necessary—truths. Once she’s done so, and the two boys are under the spell of truth that sets them on their mutual journey of self-enlightenment, the character disappears.
The funny thing is that Dirty Laundry doesn’t really even need any magic tricks. Its scenario and characters are genuine enough that Kyle and Eric could, in the course of an evening’s soak, rinse, and spin cycles, find ways to tell each other what they really need to. Speaking directly, empathetically, and honestly to a friend isn’t always the easiest thing for a teen boy, but these two characters’ friendship seems developed enough, three years along, that they could find a way without relying on a magic trick to get them there.
Even so, though, Dirty Laundry is a film that gets a lot right about the dilemmas young men face about their future. Follow the family business or your dreams? Go to college or become an entrepreneur. Stay in your lane or take the offramp? Abide by the rules or take a chance? For a relatively short and slim indie comedy, Dirty Laundry is a film with surprising depth and insight.
