Movie Nation

“The Year Between” is an amusing, infuriating and sometimes touching dance around mental illness. It’s a dry, droll dramedy that dares to show the narcissism that comes with a diagnosis that gives a college coed license to suck all of the oxygen out of everyone around her as she offhandedly and carelessly gets treatment, and childishly mucks it up.

“Today is about me,” Clemence announces, as if her family hasn’t figured that out. “EVERY day is about you,” her younger brother reminds her, and not without a truckload of resentment.

Writer, director and star Alex Heller gives this indie film an a memorably obnoxious heroine, a 20 year old who’d probably be a jerk even without the bipolar mania that is what “The German woman” (Waltrudis Buck) says is what ails her the very first time they meet. Clemence (Heller) calls her psychiatrist “the German woman’ to take away some of her power.”

Clemence (Heller) is unfiltered and unmotivated, self-medicating because “I can’t fall asleep at night and everyone hates me,” shoplifting for a cheap thrill and insulting because she can’t be bothered to be otherwise.

We’ve seen her blithely bully and terrorize her college roommate, who finally has had enough and calls Clemence’s Mom (J. Smith-Cameron), who shows up in an ancient minivan in a fury. She, too, has had enough.

Thus “the German woman.” Followed by “Lithium.” And a therapist. When you’re riding around your home town (Oak Brook, Illinois) and saying the demonic part out loud — “Somebody should BOMB this place,” folks are going to be alarmed.

“The Year Between” is a “true events” inspired account of a mentally ill “gap year.” Clemence needs help and Mom is determined to get it for her, no matter how ruinous it is for the finances of a gift shop owner and her school teacher husband (Steve Buscemi), no matter how disruptive it is for college bound younger sister Carlin (Emily Robinson) or shy, trying to come into his own high school freshman Neil (Wyatt Oleff).

The family moves her into the basement, where if nothing else, her night terrors will be a little harder to hear and her lashing out isn’t likely to break anything valuable.

Her siblings are forced out of the family’s focus as the “mentally ill burnout” takes all the attention and effort. Clemence takes the dog for a walk at down, and doesn’t come back until the wee hours of the following morning. Clemence entertains the attentions of stoner ex-classmate Ashik (Rajeev Jacob).

But she eventually gets a job down at Big Deals, the discount store.

“I don’t have any previous experience, references or emergency contacts.” Her qualifications? “I have a name, an address and a dream!”

There aren’t any real “wake-up calls” with mental illness. If there were, younger Black colleague Beth (Kyanna Simone) would be Clemence’s. Beth is much more adult, organizing and planning her future because if she goes off the rails “nobody’s taking me in to live in their basement.”

Heller is the embodiment of narcissistic deadpan in this role she has scripted and built her movie around. She tests us as the rude and rash Clemence tests her family, daring us to not like her, not root for her, to not wish her away.

Every character is generously fleshed-in, letting us see the problems dogging her neglected siblings, her mother’s determination to do right by a kid who is wrecking their family and Clemence’s dad’s upbeat nature, sorely tested by a child so ill everybody else’s issues take a back seat.

“After a point, chaos sucks.”

Heller details the pitfalls of psychotherapy — it’s expensive and not every shrink graduated in the top half of his or her class — and the side effects of prescription drugs.

And for all of that, she manages to find room for the slightest glimmer of hope.

This indie outing won’t find a large audience, but that sliver of optimism makes it a must-see movie for anybody dealing with someone on the Clemence spectrum in their life. By giving us a solid if snarky take on the what living with ADHD in its ugliest forms is like, both for the sufferer and those who suffer with her, our first-time writer-director has made a movie that can’t help but be a public service.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Alex Heller, Kyanna Simone, J Smith-Cameron, Emily Robinson, Wyatt Oleff, Rajeev Jacob, Waltrudis Buck and Steve Buscemi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Heller. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34

The voice that giggles off the page in her new memoir is unmistakably Geena Davis — funny, frank, and self-effacing, a tall woman and towering talent with a lifelong girlish streak. She is Thelma without the hellion’s drawl, Dottie Hinson, blocking home plate, daring you to run on her, Barbara in “Beetlejuice” adjusting to her newfound, dead state, with a little Valerie — coy and apple-cheeked cute making one wonder if indeed, “Earth Girls are Easy” — thrown in for sex appeal.

But this just-revealing-enough memoir is designed to make one reconsider her glamorous screen persona, and the offscreen focus that allowed Oscar winning actress, activist and accomplished archer (in her ’40s) to be a success in spite of the self-conscious-about-her-height, self-doubt and enforced humility of her upbringing.

An early anecdote recalls how Davis’ Massachusetts family was so “polite” they’d almost let a distracted, careless-driving relative plunge them into oncoming traffic and fiery deaths rather than speak out and risk being thought of as “impolite.”

The modest, chipper, upbeat image that she trots out for chat shows, book tours and speeches on behalf of her Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is a lifelong construct, and makes her standout in a business bent on rewarding “chutzpah.” Not that she doesn’t have that, too. She arm-twisted her friend Lawrence Kasdan for the role that made her and earned her an Oscar, “The Accidental Tourist.” And Madonna probably never got over her nudging her aside to star in “Angie,” a hot, working class New York script making the rounds as “Angie, I Says.”

But the lady who liked being known as “the nicest person on set” in all her movies — save for “A League of Their Own” (“You simply can’t out-nice Tom Hanks.”) let herself get pushed around a lot over the course of her career– bullying power games with directors and co-stars, harassing come-ons in auditions and the like. That compulsion is to “be nice,” polite, “not cause a fuss” or bring attention to herself gave her trouble, but she never grew out of it.

There’s something vaguely enervating about the Spanish romance “Love at First Kiss.”

It never was a romantic comedy, despite having a situation or two and a character or two ripe for it. And the film rarely crosses the line into “sweetly sad.”

But it’s a dispiriting 96 minutes in any event, and perhaps its the plot and the “hero” that make it so.

Álvaro Cervantes stars as Javier, our hunky narrator who tells his tale with a whiff of resignation in his voice-over.

Ever since he was a teen, Javier’s been able to “see” an entire relationship,” its early heat and romantic peaks and promise and eventual dissolution, just in that “first kiss.”

His superpower does him no good. Because whatever the women he “dumps” think of him, he’s playing for keeps and just now getting a grasp of the patterns that flash before his eyes in that “besame mucho moment. We meet him just as he’s about to have another drink dumped on him at his favorite pub.

No woman wants some jerk to tell her “We have no future,” no matter how certain he is that he’s irrefutably right, because he’s seen it.

Lucia (Silvia Alonso), the live-in girlfriend of his pal Roberto (Gorka Otxoa), has had a few chances to size Javier up, and gets downright mean about Mr. “Commitment-phobic.” Still, she’s got this broken-hearted friend she tries to set him up with, just as her “transition f—,” a guy you meet and exploit for uncomplicated sex, just to get over the last boyfriend.

Javier can see where the fix-up will end up, getting vomited on by a night of clubbing. So he does his best to dodge that bullet. That’s how he ends up kissing his “best friend’s girl,” who “hates” him.

And what he sees when he and Luca lock lips is straight out of a classic Levi’s commercial. This is the happy ending he’s been looking for.

The movie then becomes a coy game of avoiding the inevitable, then trying to not hurt Roberto, then surrendering. But is the inevitable as romantic as it sounds?

Suspenseful but contrived, over-the-top and far from the most “logical” thriller, file “Unseen” under “sloppy movie but a good time.”

It’s a sight-impaired person imperiled thriller, borrowing its can’t-see, a stranger on a cell phone can help plot from “See For Me.” This short, brisk and sometimes cute tale a first for Blumhouse) loses its urgency and sense of logic more than once. But it has its edge-of-your-seat moments. And thanks to stars Midori Francis and Jolene Purdy, we root for our heroines, two strangers linked by a misdial and the frantic effort to save one from her murderous ex.

“Grey’s Anatomy” alumna Francis plays Emily, who wakes up tied-up in the Michigan hunting cabin of her psychotic “trust fund baby” ex-boyfriend (Michael Patrick Lane).

Purdy, of “Orange is the New Black,” is Sam, a rural Florida convenience store clerk bracing for another day of hell-on-the-job. It’s her number that blind-without-my-glasses Emily rings when 911 reassures her that they’ll get permission to figure out where she is and save her in “an hour.”

Emily’s overpowered her “talks-too-much villain” captor — “Remember why we were together?” But she breaks her glasses, and the world’s a blur, from her cell screen to the woods she lunges into in attempting her escape.

Sam, a plump, quivering mass of insecurities bullied by her redneck boss (Nicholas X. Parsons) — “You smell like failure!” — is thus given the responsibility of directing this stranger to safety by narrating what she sees on Emily’s phone to her, looking up problem solutions (how to bust out of zip ties) on Youtube and by getting woodlore tips from the least hostile customer to stop into Gators Galore Gas and Convenience.

The cellphone as “work the problem” tool has been a feature of a few films now, including the recent “Missing.” “See for Me” was better and more believable at making the gadget a literal lifeline.

But this script finds a lot of mischief and mayhem to visit on our two linked-by-T-Mobile strangers. Emily’s ex is hunting her, and since he kidnapped her on her morning jog, she’s wearing the least-camouflaged track suit imaginable. Meek Sam, already coping with an abusive absentee boss and a busted squishy/Icee/Slurpy machine, finds herself forced to help Emily, but facing off with the Rich Bitch Customer from Hell.

Tell the truth. You pictured Miss Pyle when you read that.

As Emily’s plight grows more dire, Sam’s situation escalates in the most Missi Pyle way ever.

There are a couple of gonzo moments in that convenience store that could have set the tone for “Unseen.” Pyle typically appears in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fish-eye lens close-ups, exaggerating her over-the-top menace.

Some of Emily’s confrontations with rich nut job Charlie have an almost comical “couples therapy” edge.

And there’s a bit of bonding between the two women — who cannot KNOW both are Asian-American — over the racism of “Breakfast at Tiffany;s” (Mickey Rooney’s “white guy in ‘yellow face'” stereotype) and the way cruel kids use “Power Rangers” insultingly on Asian classmates.

There’s good stuff here, not all of it lost in a sometimes illogical, often slow-footed 76 minute (with credits) thriller. Engaging leads aside, this never quite “gets there.” But at least the story doesn’t waste a lot of anybody’s time in the attempt.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, pot use

Cast: Midori Francis, Jolene Purdy, Michael Patrick Lane, Nicholas X Parsons and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Yoko Okumura, scripted by Salvatore Cardoni and Brian Rawlins. A Blumhouse film, a Paramount Home Entertainment/MGM+ release.

Running time: 1:16

Here’s a Polish romance whose title is a promise about what it provides. “Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me” is an invitation to a nap.

A corny melodrama with the classic “neglected” wife, “self-absorbed” husband and irresistible “old flame,” the screenwriters throw this thing together without a lot of attention to particulars.

Everything that happens feels contrived. Every character is more sketched-in than fleshed-out. Hell, the two ladies who wrote this give their male leads the first names of actors in the cast in other roles — Janek and Maciej. I’d say “coincidence,” but judging from the product of their typing, the safer bet is that they were that unimaginative and lazy.

Nina (Roma Gasiorowska of “Lesson Plan”) is a working mother of two, a journalist with a lifestyle website. She has a husband (Wojciech Zielinksi) who sloughs off almost all parenting and domestic responsibilities on her, and after nine years all he’s really up for is “a quickie.”

But at least he has his annual solo backpacking trip through Iceland to look forward to.

Her Dad (Jacek Koman) sees it, the way Maciej has “his” car, his work and his life.

“If only only half of the couple sacrifices…”

Her judgmental martinet of a mother (Ewa Wencel) is less understanding. About everything.

And then an old flame is hired to be a reporter under Nina, apparently without her being consulted or even knowing about it. Jacek (Maciej Musial) just shows up and rocks her flashbacks. It won’t be long, we know, before this underling is under him.

Every script twist throwing them together is as obvious as every character trait/action that points to a doomed marriage. Every line of dialogue is as bad in English as it was in the original Polish.

“I feel so...valued by you.” “I like your driving. It’s…gentle.“

The attractive leads have chemistry and the potential for sparks, but there’s no getting past the naps before and after that moment when somebody insists “Tonight, you’re sleeping with me.”

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity

Cast: Roma Gasiorowska, Maciej Musial, Wojciech Zielinski, Jacek Koman and Ewa Wencel

Credits: Directed by Robert Wichrowski, scripted by Anna Janyska and Anna Szczypczynska. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Rosario and Lakeith and Owen and DeVito and Jamie Lee and Tiffany and Leto and on it goes — ghosts and ghost busting? And all on July 28.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of movies that just came in to review. “Urgent” the last minute publicists say.

“Manana,” I say.

Why?

#ItHappensEverySpring.

A spring training break at the Trop in the Banana Republic of Florida. And no movie fan would be fully dressed without his Durham Bulls cap.

Unfortunately titled, not quite as polished, shot, edited and “expert” driven as you might hope, “American Bolshevik” begins with a wealthy Newport, Rhode Island philanthropist recounting stories of dogs she’s lost to coyotes. It features more disturbing still photographs and scenes of wanton slaughter and animal cruelty than the average viewer would find tolerable.

But this documentary about the durability and brutally, expensively and stubbornly-pursued efforts to wipe-out North America’s most populous and successful canine predator, the coyote, is certainly an eye opener.

It’s titled from a phrase that Western nature writer and folklorist Dan Flores, the anchor interview in the film, coins to describe these ultimate survivors, predators who have thrived despite backward, “official” and special interest-driven efforts to exterminate it the way species from wolves and grizzlies to buffalo and bighorn sheep were almost wiped out.

Like “Bolsheviks,” the Red Menace pursued with a murderous, extermination-minded zero tolerance in from the 1910s onward, the canis latrans has endured. It has survived trapping, bounty-hunting “contests,” mass-poisoning, shooting from helicopters and snowmobiles and government-backed planned-extinction efforts. Much of this has been conducted out of public sight, with public money and largely at the urging of “lazy,” shortsighted and stubbornly misguided and misinformed Western ranching interests.

An Eastern sheep farming wildlife biologist is the one who characterizes the 150 years of ranchers this way in a film that makes the case that bad human practices are always what leads to “bad” coyotes, who adapt to prey that’s made easily accessible by “open range” grazing, to suburban human “feeding nature” practices, critters who react murderously to any other canine that comes sniffing around their cubs.

“They don’t call them ‘wily’ for nothing!” one coyote-studying expert enthuses.

Being a species of dogs, there’s always the danger of sentimentalizing a predator ferocious and clever enough to hunt and kill sheep, and in its larger Eastern wolf-interbred incarnation, take down deer. But even folks who have lost pets to them — leash-law violating dog and cat owners — confess a fascination with these new “neighbors who migrated north and east from the American Southwest, west and prairies to tip over their garbage can and eat the dog and cat food left out for their household companions.

Flores, a Louisiana native now living in New Mexico and professor emeritus with the University of Montana-Missoula, collects stories and Native myths attached to coyotes, stories that pass on the intelligence and foibles they seem to share with humans in fable form, and marvels at their adaptability.

Others note the long road traveling from officially-sanctioned slaughter and the long road to turning away from it. A lot of this still goes on thanks to ranchers and their livestock associations, whose business models were built on free access to public land for their own personal use and cheap meat made possible by a 150 year long government handout. Their practices get backhanded more than once in the film, which suggests that corporate mentality drives coyote killing simply to save Big Ag and entitled fat cat ranchers from the bother and expense of fencing in their four-footed assets.

But “American Bolshevik” isn’t likely to change that mindset, or end the pointless (“Hunting them NEVER works” is explained in blunt, biological and mathematical terms.) and destructive practices in the land of “Money talks.” Nor is the film likely to reach a wide audience thanks to its title and sometimes graphic imagery and harsh subject matter.

Still, if you’ve ever stumbled into a coyote on a hike or checking out your yard or patio in passing, the film is worth a look just to familiarize yourself with what you’re seeing and dealing with and what you’re doing to enable or encourage the stigma of a “menace” laid upon a singing wild dog who’s just doing what comes naturally.

Rating: unrated, disturbing images of animal cruelty and mass slaughter

Cast: Dan Flores, Numi Mitchell, Camilla Fox and Chris Schadler

Credits: Scripted and directed by Julie Marrron. A Lemon Martini release on Apple TV, Amazon and Vudu

Running time: 1:24

I can’t speak for what they’re like today, but in less politically-correct times, university writer’s conferences were a literary spectacle that unleashed famous novelists, poets and non-fiction authors and their fans and groupies on assorted august academic institutions and their young, “innocent” student bodies in what amounted to an annual academic bacchanale.

The limp but lighthearted and sensitive “A Little White Lie” brought to mind all sorts of lore I picked up covering and broadcasting my grad school’s mid-winter midwestern fete, the University of North Dakota Writer’s Conference. Tales of which literary legend chased which faculty member, or of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who tested a 40-below March in his birthday suit while drunk, entered UND myth.

The film, about an imposter (Michael Shannon) crashing such a festival, having been invited by mistake, brought to mind a hilarious story I heard (and broadcast) at the UND version of such an event. Norman Mailer read at that conference in the mid-80s. He chose “Our Man At Harvard,” a comic anecdote, heavily fictionalized I trust, about a scheme Mailer and others cooked up as Harvard undergrads to raise money for their literary magazine.

They schemed to pretend they’d landed the great British novelist Somerset Maugham for a fundraiser cocktail party to help fund their university literary magazine. They hadn’t reached Maugham, but instead teamed up to maintain the ruse that “you just missed him” during the party in a large, rambling house on campus. It’s hilarious, and so much funnier than this movie, based on a novel by Chris Belden, which could have been inspired by any of a number of writer’s conference stories, with an added fictional “reclusive author” twist.

In Michael Maren’s downbeat debut “comedy,” Kate Hudson plays a writer and academic at southwestern Acheron U., someone whose annual writer’s conference is facing extinction until she lands a long-shot star attraction for the 92nd edition of the event. He’s a J.D. Salinger figure named “Shriver,” who published “Goat Time,” a generational literary event, over 20 years before. He wrote it and promptly vanished from sight.

She gets an address of someone with that name, a sad, introverted alcoholic who works as an apartment building super in a city back east. When this Shriver (Shannon) gets the invite and reads that there’s a “prize,” and figures the real guy would never surface to expose him, he and a drinking buddy Lenny (Mark Boone Junior) resolve to reply.

A follow-up letter asks him to show up with “new writing” to share. So Shriver gets a notepad and starts scribbling an introspective, Bukowski-esque novel about a wet spot on the ceiling of his apartment.

He’d like to chicken out, even after deplaning out West. But running into the disappointed Claire (Hudson) in the airport bar makes him take pity, and our play begins.

Shriver’s conscience is the alter ego (Shannon as well) whom he hears in his head, berating him and assuring him he’ll never get away with it.

It’s the sort of thing that could make a sensitive fellow like Shriver have a William S. Burroughs-styled existential crisis, wondering if he IS Shriver, if he killed his wife, which is what the misogynist hero of his “over-hyped adolescent macho wet dream of a novel” did.

Meeting the drunken Thoreau-quoting faculty member/writer Wasserman (Don Johnson, the life of the party) who drinks so much that he can’t drive, so he rides to work each day on his trusty steed — Byron — a literary-minded grad assistant, an opinionated Black feminist poet (Aja Naomi King) and a fan (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) complicates his trap.

“I need you to behave for three days,” Claire pleads. “Can you do that? I need you to be the man who wrote one brilliant novel.”

Taking his pal Lenny’s direction to “always be depressed,” with a natural eccentricity (never showering), Shriver is reluctantly dragged to this workshop or that panel discussion or reception where a cougar groupie (Wendy Malick) tries to add him to her trophy wall, Shriver just might pull it off.

Big, brassy popular pop band takes an Iron Curtain countries tour for the State Dept. and the wheels come off their 1970s career.

This seems paranoid and perhaps delusional, but true, false or exaggerated, it could be fascinating.

March. 24.