“Or Something” is a not-half-bad indie romance in the “Before Sunrise,” “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” tradition.
Two strangers are thrown together for a long day of trying to collect a debt. They talk and talk and try to make or avoid anything like a “connection” as they do.
Insights about their characters, pieces of their histories tell each other and us how they met at this Brooklyn apartment and why they have to take on this Quixotic quest from Broolyn to Harlem, home to “Uptown Mike” and their money.
Defense mechanisms go up and come down, kneejerk prejudices are offered up and swatted down, all folded into a day of generally engaging subway ride chats, diner discourse and walks through a nearly empty park mere days before Christmas.
Olivia (Mary Neely) meets Amir (Kareem Rahma) as they’re both heading for the same Brooklyn apartment. We’ve just seen her selling clothes to raise cash. He’s fighting some sort of family fire via cell phone.
As he’s walking in the same direction, just a few steps behind her, he earns a New York “Hello.”
“I will f—–g TASE you!”
Relax. He’s going to see Teddy. So is she. He lets her possibly racist hostility slide. Her “Sorry” is almost sincere enough to warrant it.
She needs cash that Teddy “owes” her. So does he. They both want the exact same amount — $1200. “Synchronicity?” Maybe. But Teddy (Brandon Wardell), in a wheelchair, his foot in a boot-cast, is all about deflection and distraction.
Couldya REFILL my Big Gulp? I could “write you an IOU on the IOU.”
Teddy’s manipulative. Teddy’s privileged. What New Yorker would trust Teddy to give them the time of day, much less money?
Surely they know that “your money is with Uptown Mike” is a dodge. No, Teddy can’t give you Mike’s exact address. No, he won’t give out the man’s phone number. There’s an excuse for why Mike has no social media presence/photo for them to look at.
Mike’s a “private dude?” Sure.
But off the two of them go, as beggars can’t be choosers and each appears to have some sort of cash-starved deadline. She wouldn’t talk at all, but she burns out her phone’s battery playing Sudoku on the subway. And when Olivia does converse, her attitudes, gender dogma and generation blurt out in a single sentence.
“Guys are only nice to the girls they want to have sex with.”
Amir’s reassurances to the contrary fall on deaf ears. Citing all the social media blasts from women who don’t “want to be approached” at work, in the gym, in the park or in the pubs and clubs is why “I just don’t talk to girls in real life.”
They have a day to work past this impasse, an afternoon fraught with confrontation (David Zayas plays the anti-gentrification crusader with a baseball bat, Uptown Mike), confession and confirmation bias.
A second tradition built into this project is the “Write a script you can star in” make-your-own-break ethos that sees Neely (“Happiness for Beginners”) and Rahma, who was in a couple of episodes of “Poker Face” cook up this story built around all this conversation, New York locations and two story arcs to follow, all of it divided into time-check chapters with cutesie titles riffing on the film’s title.
“Like 2…or something.”
The characters are interesting and the conversation, ranging from one’s “everything is connected” reason for being respectful, acting with kindness and morality to anecdotes about different cultures’ reactions to death and Istanbul as “the hair transplant capital of the world.”
But Neely and Rahma and director Jeffrey Scotti Schroeder find a light tone, a “vibe,” and then betray it in an effort to “explain” this or that behavior and worldview. The ending feels plausible but not “true” to the spirit of the film.
A lot of this feels screenwriterly, which makes Brandon Wardell‘s repellent, self-absorbed and unaccountable douche-bro poster child Teddy entertaining, but the sort of character who only exists in screenplays.
Our leads, however, make these New York “types” wholly believable.
And you have to credit “Or Something” for doing what it sets out to do — introduce two characters who neither they nor we would pay any heed, and make us interested in their lives and invested in their quest, hoping for the best from Teddy, Uptown Mike or an ending we can live with.
Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking
Cast: Mary Neely, Kareem Rahma, David Zayas and Brandon Wardell
Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Scotti Schroeder, scripted by Mary Neely and Kareem Rahma. A Factory 25 release.
Running time: 1:21
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