Movie Nation

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

You look at the episode list and you think to yourself, “Do I really want to spend nine hours digging into ten years of the political life of anti-Equal Rights Amendment crusader Phyllis Schlafly?”

It’s a valid question. In this, the golden age of bingeable short-term series TV, every narrative idea is stretched to the point of breaking to lure the viewer in, hook you and drag the damned thing out into eternity as it slowly ambles from point A to point B.

But “Mrs. America” (April 15, on Hulu) is, for the most part, worth the short-made-long journey of Schlafly’s life and her key role in the rise of Reagan and the end of the FDR/Kennedy age of progressivism, social progress and long march toward gender, race and income equality.

The first episode, introducing us to “Phyllis,” her allies and foes, sets the series up beautifully. And the finale, “Reagan,” is strong enough to be a stand-alone film all its own.

Credit the casting, sharp dialogue and an insightful script that picks up on both Schlafly’s methods and the fundamental hypocrisy (and blunt dishonesty) of her stance, as well as the back-biting bitchiness that doomed “libber” enemies.

Cate Blanchett gives us the shrewd, smiling, June Cleaver-with-a-switchblade persona that made Schlafly famous — “talking points” (often exaggerations, sometimes flat-out lies) hammered home on every “Phil Donahue Show” appearance. And we see her struggle to hide the disappointment or bitter fury whenever powerful men (Barry Goldwater among them) she is lobbying take her self-owning use of “we homemakers” literally, and ask her to take notes for their meeting.

Just like the second-class citizen status that she made her cause.

We see the idea of fighting the ERA handed to her by a friend (Sarah Paulson), watch her run with this into the spotlight, writing a newsletter and holding her coveted “mailing list” of committed conservatives close to her as everybody from womanizing Congressman Phil Crane (James Marsden) to Ronald Reagan himself leans on her to share it.

In a pre-Fox News/Rush Limbaugh era, TV news was expected to be impartial, but conservatives used the “Fairness Doctrine” to demand equal time to contest the facts of any debate via opinion. Of course, when they took control of Washington, they killed the Fairness Doctrine so that Limbaugh and Hannity et al and the stations that carried their programming wouldn’t face the same “give the other side equal time” requirements that they’d gamed.

Then there’s the infighting between the various factions of “feminism” as it was known in the 1970s — with pioneer Betty Friedan (Tracy Ullman) bitterly sniping at Ms. Magazine “cover-girl” Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), and Congresswomen Bella Abzug (Margot Martindale, dialing down the drawl to play New York Jewish) and Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Abuba, who has no trace of Chisholm’s distinctive lisp) unable to keep the peace.

Schlafly mobilized after the ERA passed in Congress with the idea that “It’s not too late to stop it.” She and her team fought the battle, one state legislature ratification vote at a time.

The feminists are slow to pick up on how “the men finally found the perfect smokescreen for their chauvinism — women.” Declining to debate Schlafly, they let her spread her fear — often via deliberate misreadings of the amendment — and hers became the only version widely disseminated.

It’s a fascinating political history that creator Davhi Waller and her team take us into, built on the idea that just enough women could be radicalized and mobilized to fight against women’s rights to amplify the voices of extremism. And once in power, the Reagan/Jesse Helms/Jerry Falwell and Co. (a very young Paul Manafort is glimpsed, at one point) carve the “culture wars” lines out in stone, leading to smearing of liberal ideals, destruction of unions, rapid income inequality and the manufactured “fears” of a vast, unrestrained and over-financed right wing hype machine.

And Blanchett makes the heroic villainness of the piece something you least expect her to be — a self-martyred victim, an ambitious and cunning Lady Macbeth without the self-reflection to see her advocacy as hypocrisy at its most naked, but smart enough to see how small she really is after a decade of gnawing her own and her gender’s legs off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Margot Martindale, John Slattery, James Marsden, Tracy Ullman

Credits: Created by Davhi Waller. An FX/Hulu series

Running time: 9 episodes @ 1 hour each.

Even Ed Helms might cringe if the coarse, predictably dumb and absurdly violent Netflix action comedy “Coffee & Kareem” gives him some sort of comeback.

Then again, forcing him, Taraji P. Henson and the rest of the cast to repeat themselves, making fresh versions of this repellent farce, might be the perfect punishment that fits the crime.

Because that’s what this ugly, irritating, blood-spattered wallow is. It’s not supposed to be for kids, but pairing up Ed with an over-the-top foul-mouthed tween (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) suggests it is.

Backhanded slaps at Detroit, dirty cops, idiotically-indulgent single-mom parenting, a statement on “the death of childhood, as we know it?” That’s all pretty much out in the open.

There are a couple of laughs, generally not from the leads. And the gory mayhem, from “accidental” executions at the end of a torture session to what a grenade does to a human body, is played for giggles, too.

I had to double-check the credits. Screenwriting newcomer Shane Mack did it, not ultra-violent action comedy specialist Shane Black (“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”). The guy who directed “Stuber” was behind the camera. Yeah, that’s obvious.

But Problem One is young Mr. Gardenhigh (of TV’s “Henry Danger” and “Danger Force”), more specifically his character. If there has ever been a more charmless, grating, obnoxious “hero” at the center of an action comedy, I can’t think of him.

I can’t quote Kareem, because every word out of his mouth is raw-dog ugly, every thought is fifth grade sexual (he raps an R-rated come-on to his teacher for his class poetry assignment). He blackmails hall monitors and throws threats around like a streetwise gang banger, when in truth he’s just a spoiled mama’s boy.

His mom (Henson) shows no sign of ever so much as trying to curb his behavior. She’s a nurse, dating a cop named Coffee (Helms), and tries to throw the two of them together to bond.

The plump, dreadlocked punk uses that as an excuse to hire a murderous drug dealer (RonReaco Lee) who just escaped from the cops to kill his mom’s cop boyfriend.

He’ll pay for the his eith his pocket change.

I guess it’s funny that, you know, the cop who let Orlando (Lee) escape was Officer Coffee, who has been demoted and bullied by the TV-friendly detective (Betty Gilpin) who caught the guy. Of at least it’s SUPPOSED to be funny.

That near-hiring of a hitman goes wrong, a dirty cop is murdered and Coffee & Kareem are on the run, trying to prevent the bad guys from silencing them or getting to Kareem’s mom, trying to dodge the law (David Alan Grier has the thankless/laughless job of playing Coffee’s boss) which assumes Coffee is the cop killer, and a child kidnapper.

Yes, pedophilia accusations from the kid are a running gag here.

Helms plays another variation on his grinning nebbish, here, a loser who describes himself to Kareem as “like a bruised fruit — a little blemished, but still delicious.”

If Krass Kareem could stop screaming profanities to hear that, he’d have certainly made much of the word “fruit.”

Because it’s that kind of comedy, “Bad Lieutenant” jokes, killers-in-training cracking up about “practicing my lines for when I’m fixin’ to kill somebody,” “child soldier– brainwashing” gags.

Political correctness is gone before the opening credits are over. And it’s not as though some of this might have worked, but everybody in it is just maddening to spend time with.

Henson can blow a fuse with the best of them, and having her kid call her “six Halle Berry movies mad” at them is kind of amusing. Her telling the trying-to-be-hip-to-the-Black-experience Coffee to “Stop watching BET” is almost funny. But there’s no getting around that she’s playing a shrill, parenthood-challenged stereotype.

Helms is mostly a walking sight gag, a punching bag here. And as for the kid, I’m in agreement with the cop who, on meeting Kareem, suggests a “six hundred week abortion” is in order.

But Gilpin, star of “The Hunt,” playing a short-tempered tyrant, gets every truly funny line and makes every line-reading sing. She’s not just fighting the cocaine trade, she tells a TV reporter, she’s “protecting the tiny nostrils of Detroit.”

Her instructions to her cops before a raid are “Let’s keep this quiet. Don’t SHOOT anybody. We don’t want this s— on Youtube!”

She empties out a strip club (where Coffee has taken Kareem) with a shout, “Go HOME. WORK on your MARRIAGES!”

I could see a “funny mean cop” series built out of her and this character.

She’s the redeeming quality of “Coffee & Kareem,” the sugar that masks (a teensy bit) how distasteful the whole affair is.

But an old rule of movie reviewing holds truer than ever with this one. Never expect anything out of a film with an awful pun as its title.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, profanity and drugs

Cast: Ed Helms, Terrence Little Gardenhigh, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin, RonReaco Lee and David Alan Grier.

Credits: Directed by Michael Douse, script by Shane Mack. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:28

Just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia there’s an organic produce and livestock “eat local” farm run by a collective of combat veterans as a form of self-help therapy, a way of easing them back into civilian life by re-purposing their war zone mind-set.

The product of their labor is farm-to-table “good food,” and the byproduct is healing trauma through a community of people just like them.

“Comfort Farms” is the name of the non-profit, taking its name from a fallen comrade. It’s also the title of a documentary about its work. Filmmaker Carlisle Kellam talks to founder Jon Jackson and other veterans there about their work, their former lives in combat zones and their efforts to “give something” to their community, while taking charge of their own drug-free, therapy-free (or post-therapy) mental health treatment.

Kellam uses interviews, archival combat footage, TV news features and segments from a talk Jackson gives to veterans’ groups, community organizations and schools, papering the film with quotations from veterans, writers like G.K. Chesterton and others about war, the nature of being a survivor of such trauma and the like.

But the big juxtaposition of the film is pairing up all this material about the soldiers with livestock slaughter, which they go to great pains to describe in ritualistic terms.

They butcher the pigs, chickens, cattle, ducks and bunnies “in a spiritual, respectful manner.” They speak about what that process — grim, even to somebody who’s had to pull the trigger for a living — and what it costs them. But there’s little evidence of that, or none shown on camera.

To a one, they’re very in-your-face about this to the film’s viewers, and to the patrons of the farm, who gather for parties, cook-outs and butchering rituals — laying hands on the animals, “make them trust you,” trying to ease the end of their lives, their “sacrifice” for our “good eating.”

You don’t like to see this? That’s “cowardly.” So “eat more vegetables.”

There’s more going on here, with men who have lived through bloody injuries and watching friends die, coping via what they acknowledge is “never an easy thing,” taking an animal’s life with a gun, knife or hatchet.

Kellam, by limiting his film to “in their own words,” reinforces the self-help ethos that Jackson and his fellow vets preach. Having veterans talk about “misconceptions about veterans,” about the flawed tendency of the public and the media to lump them all into a group, lauded and fund-raised for as “an object of pity” or “an object of worship” (Hellooooo Toby Keith.) is unusual and enlightening.

But its narrow “in veterans’ own words” focus allows the film to avoid the big psychological questions about the personailty types that join the “all volunteer military” and what people who have been in combat really get out of spilling all this blood once they come home.

They’re not wrong in that “locally grown” and “if you can’t kill it, maybe you shouldn’t eat it” thinking. But “Comfort Farms” leaves a lot skirted, unspoken and seriously-under-analyzed.

Not everybody in this post-VFW era club served in combat. And while every person and situation is unique, there are psychological profiles that would be helpful to consider, explanations that those too close to the situation have a hard time articulating.

They’re doing good, both for themselves and for their community. And anything that breaks the patterns of “troubled” combat survivors — suicides, domestic violence, joining motorcycle gangs and the like — is to be celebrated.

But personally, I could use a little of that analysis and a lot fewer too-quick-to-register quotations, and maybe fewer of the somewhat random insertions of graphic animal slaughter in all this talk of healing.

Thank you for your service. Now let’s hear what it “typically” does to someone who makes that sacrifice, or who “enjoys” the “good action” and adrenaline rush of combat (several say so) and signs up for repeated tours.

And what’s really going on that makes them want to come home to kill cows, bleed-out pigs and chop the heads off ducks?

MPAA Rating: Unrated, combat violence, graphic scenes of livestock slaughter and butchery

Credits: Written and directed by Carlisle Kellam.

Running time: 1:16

You could never blame Holly Hunter for not working as much as we’d like.

She could pick a series, here and there, voice Elastigirl in two “Incredibles” movies, show up in tiny but sparkling supporting turns in “The Big Sick” and take a swing at the odd indie drama with promise (“Manglehorn”).

But the glory of her Oscar-winning years, when she was the dazzling muse of James Brooks (“Broadcast News”), the Coens (“Raising Arizona,””O Brother Where Art Thou”), Jane Campion (“The Piano”) and playwright Beth Henley (“Miss Firecracker”) was always going to prove impossible to cling to.

The writing set a high standard, the parts were meatier and the novelty of her rarely-hidden drawl made her work stand out, aside from the fact she was doing the most translucent, beatific acting of the ’80s and 90s. Aging is always tougher on an actress’s career, but in her case working less pointed to a Hollywood and indie cinema that just wasn’t getting the job done in terms of screenwriting.

Like late-career Bette Davis, her career tells us she’s a woman out of her time.

“Strange Weather” has the feel of a vintage Hunter vehicle — a quirky Southern story, a hint of Southern Gothic in the tragedy hanging over it, an intelligent, desirable character pushing 60, a woman still impulsive, temperamental and testy.

But writer-director Katherine Dieckmann lets her down. And every so often, Hunter lets Dieckmann down — showing little of the flash of her best work, out-acted in a couple of scenes, unable to animate recycled cliches, nothing special in an utterly generic, obvious and blase road trip dramedy.

She plays Darcy Walker, an admissions clerk at a tiny Georgia college in her hometown, no college degree but smarter than that, rail thin and overly fond of her duct-taped-together Ford pickup and cowgirl hat, cigarettes and drinking alone.

Carrie Coon positively glows as her best friend and cross-the-street neighbor, a co-conspirator in their late-night gardening binges, probably “an actual lesbian (living with a colleague), but maybe just dabbling.”

Kim Coates of TV’s “Sons of Anarchy” and “Bad Blood” is the bar owner with whom Darcy has had an on-again, off-again fling that’s lasted for years. But she keeps him at arm’s length.

Darcy’s not overly-concerned that layoffs are coming at GPU, sort of adrift and without purpose. Then a chance encounter with a guy (Turner Crumbley) she knew as a kid rattles her. We learn Darcy had a son. He’s dead. And a college classmate has gotten rich down in New Orleans running a make-your-own-hot-dog franchise that sounds like her late son’s college business class pitch.

There’s nothing for it but to start digging around in the past she has avoided grappling with, asking questions about son Walker’s last days of those who knew him — stoners, roomies, pals.

There’s nothing for it but taking a little road trip down to the Big Easy to confront the scoundrel.

Darcy meets up with young men from her son’s past, and an old man from her own. Glenne Headly, whose career was hemmed in much the way Hunter’s has been, plays an old drinking buddy.

It took Dieckmann five years to pull together the financing for this indie, filmed mostly in small town Mississippi. Imitation Faulkner and Beth Henley is a harder sell than telling a story about women of a certain age.

Her film is a predictable rehash of road picture cliches — any excuse to take “backroads” — and imitation Faulkner Southernisms, with lines about having to “yield to your indomitable will” and “You do know it’s my job to protect you from you?” and that trite Southern literary trope about how a chance encounter or coincidence means the dead are “calling to me” give away the writer-director’s game.

Her son’s “issues” with his mama similarly feel small when freighted with so much import.

“He wanted things to be normal!”

“NORMAL is over-RATED!”

Hunter does what she can with these lines, and the character. Coon gets the picture’s big speeches and best moments. And none of it, including the “dramatic” climax, amounts to a hill of beans, as we say down here. Beans we’ve seen and cooked too many times to count, beans we’ve been served too often to find anything novel or tasty in them.

MPAA Rating: R for a scene of sexuality

Cast: Holly Hunter, Carrie Coon, Kim Coates, Glenne Headly and Turner Crumbley

Credits: Written and directed by Katherine Dieckmann. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Rare is the combat film that’s as awful, and instantly-so, as “Rogue Warfare,” a thriller as inept as its clunky title.

It begins with a poorly-accented diatribe by the Supreme Leader (Essam Ferris) of a new terror cell called “The Black Mask.”

But Supreme Leader’s mask looks like last season’s sale at Victoria’s Secret. It’s a damned veil, and his whole getup is borderline hijab — feminine. When you’ve wrapped your villain in ninja black with a veil, it’s all downhill from there. And having him go on and on and on about “Your world despises us” to a video camera, asking rhetorical questions (again, in English) about “What pushes my meter?”

Give the guy a lisp and this could be a pre-“woke” comedy.

His followers raid a village, take prisoner the one villager who shoots several of their number, and pointlessly gives him the “You’re either with me or against me” speech, when he knows and we know and the victim knows he’s just going to shoot him and his entire family.

Veteran heavy Stephen Lang makes a car payment for showing up to pen a letter and narrate it in interior monologue (Didn’t even have to memorize lines!) as the president launching Project Rogue.

The script has Trumpian alliance-with-our-enemies overtones, as it includes China and Russia in this international commando team sent to hunt Black Mask and Diana Ross and the Supremes Leader.

The firefights feature digital blood bursts, the dialogue is leftover from 432 previous combat pictures — EVERY guy ever shot in action is told “Look at me! STAY with ME!” — and there’s Chris Mulkey, another veteran heavy, wearing three stars and sending this crack corps into combat.

Some of these dudes don’t appear to have ever held a firearm, and can’t fake it convincingly even when they know the camera is on them.

It’s rubbish, start to finish. And bless their hearts, I see they’ve got a sequel in the works.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Katie Keene, Essam Ferris, Rory Markham, Fernando Chien, Stephen Lang and Chris Mulkey

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Gunther.  A Saban Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

How far will you go into a series, limited or otherwise, before committing to it, heart, soul and investment in time?

Because pandemic or not, storytelling in the “Binge TV” era has a couple of common traits that a savvy viewer makes before punching in Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Topic, etc.

The pace of storytelling is geologically slow. Series creators have become quite profligate with the viewers’ time. And hand-in-glove with that glacial pacing is a “less is more” sort of storytelling that resists the urge to put a lot of action or incidents into each episode, or to get to the point with any sense of urgency.

“Tales from the Loop,” a new series from the fellow behind “Legion,” was  inspired by paintings by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, dated looking slice-of-life images that showed kids playing in the ruins of an alt-history ’80s sci-fi dystopia — derelict robots, abandoned spacecraft or hi-tech labs.

It plays like a TV series inspired by paintings. Striking to look at — pretty. Static. Austere. Slow.

Creator Nathaniel Halpern (“Outcast” and “Resurrection” are his other pertinent credits) is reaching for that mystery that the audience will latch onto more than characters we connect with and who bring us back.

“Loop,” basically eight stand-alone sci-fi “tales” set in an Ohio town, circa 1979, is about a place where life is impacted by an underground “loop” — think CERN, particle colliders or some such.

The director of MOEP — the Mercer Ohio Experimental Physics lab — is Russ (Jonathan Pryce), who pitches their work and its impact on this place as creating things we know to be impossible, “and yet, there they are.” He repeats that claim to his grandson (Duncan Joiner). We don’t have to hear discussions of time travel, multiverses and the like to feel or speculate that this is what he’s talking about. Science fiction?

“I prove its possible.”

Thus, episodes tamper with mortality, revisiting your younger self via some magical fluke of “The Eclipse,” a huge ball-gadget buried within the confines of the vast underground complex.

We sense little urgency in any of these stories, nothing particularly sinister either. Only the atl-tech ’80s weirdness of “The Loop” connects it to “Stranger Things,” “Black Mirror” or the granddaddy of weird-for-weird’s-sake TV, “Twin Peaks.”

Yes, there might be a mystery to be solved, and it’s to do with this place and the work that that makes a little girl’s mother (and her house) disappear. Or was it ever there at all?

What’s with that mechanical hand Cole’s father (Paul Schneider) sports?

What does Russ’s daughter (Rebecca Hall) know about what’s going on, what’s to come and how is she able to figure out what’s up with the girl and the missing mom in a flash?

And did they really cast the great Jane Alexander, fly her to Winnipeg and give her nothing more than breakfast, babysitting and gardening scenes (with almost no dialogue)?

All of which circles me back around to that fundamental question, is it worth the eight hours it’ll take to binge this beast into submission?

Taking into account different strokes for different folks, I know that SOME people got more out of “Little Fires,” SOME are still chewing on “Ozark” (1.5 seasons for me, enough), and some head-cases are still investing in “Walking Dead,” etc.

I love the genre, and if I was looking for a theatrical film analog to “Tales from the Loop,” it would be “Another Earth,” a chill, austere and faintly creepy feature starring indie darling Brit Marling.

Did you see it? Think that would be worth eight hours of your viewing life? There you go.

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce. Jane Alexander, Paul Schneider

Credits: Created by Nathaniel Halpern, episodes directed by Jodie Foster, Andrew Stanton, So Yong Kim, Ti West, Mark Romanek, with Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield”) amoong the producers. etc.

Running time: 8 episodes @50 minutes each.

A winsome young caregiver, a spooky old house.

What might be afoot in this May 22 release?

Ned Kelly is Australia’s Jesse James, a pioneer-era outlaw hero (to some) and icon of Aussie defiance, independence and Old West-style violence. He robbed and murdered his way to infamy, led a revolt against British oppression and wrote, in essence, his own myth and eulogy with his “Jelrilderie Letter.”

So it’s no wonder he’s deeply carved into the ex-prison colony’s national identity and Aussie machismo. He’s been depicted on films since the birth of Australian cinema. And now, half a century after rocker Mick Jagger played him and 40 years after the semi-official end of punk, he gets a cross-dressing punk rock treatment in “True History of the Kelly Gang” from, of all people, the director of “Assassin’s Creed.”

Justin Kurzel promises a bleak, unblinking depiction of what created Kelly — the wasteland, the family history (Kelly’s Irish father was a criminal “transported” to the colony in the mid-19th century) and political climate — an emerging sense of “Aussie” and an unending antipathy for “those pommy bastards,” the British.

The film, based on the historically bastardized novel (by Peter Carey) of the same title, is a grim and uneven slog — visual flourishes, inspired casting that leads to a few brilliant performances, and an exhausting mid-section that halts the action and shortchanges the “career” of the outlaw (“bushrangers,” they called them) and his army.

The flashes of action early thin out during the later acts, returning for the operatic violence of the finale, when Kelly’s armor-plated “army” faced off with an army of the law.

If North Americans know anything about Kelly, it’s that — Jesse James facing his final shootout behind iron plates and a neo-Medieval helmet.

“True History” begins in an ugly childhood, with an ineffectual and lawless father and more importantly his willful, raging mother (Essie Davis of “The Babadook”). Ellen Kelly’s awfully fond of the phrase “real man,” as in “there’s no REAL man” in the territory (Victoria) to stand up to the outrages facing the family, the liberties she lets the British constable (Charlie Hunnam) take under Ned’s dad’s own roof.

She’s the one who “sells” the boy, once his dad has taken the rap for castle rustling young Ned (Orlando Schwerdt) has carried out to feed the family. She’s the one who orders him, “You go out there and be a big man. You go out there and show the world!”

Russell Crowe makes Ned’s mentor, the bushranger Harry Power, a grandfatherly type fond of his pipe, and determined to make the kid over in how own violent image.

“I’ve told your mother ‘No one can ride with me if they can’t pull the trigger!'”

George Mackay (“1917”) becomes the fearsome and wild-eyed Ned as an adult, forming his gang, accepting their decision (passed down from his father, it is implied) to disguise themselves as women when the need arises.

It’s here that the movie staggers and halt, with Kelly’s odd connection to another constable (Nicholas Hoult), his mother’s imprisonment and his romantic tie to the prostitute Mary Hearn (Thomasin McKenzie of “JoJo Rabbit”).

The film only picks up with its finale, and even that grand, murderous and visually stunning spectacle is somewhat spoiled by a preachy epilogue.

Kelly’s brainstorm about armor plating himself has two sources, according to “True History” — an armor plated (anachronistically so) shack that Power hid out in, and Kelly’s exposure to images of the U.S.S. Monitor, “impregnable” ironclad of the U.S. Civil War.

Mackay’s heated performance is matched by Davis and Crowe in its intensity. Everybody else is having a vamp, especially Hoult and Hunnam, with Hunnam so deep into whatever accent he’s doing that he needs subtitles.

An exception? Young Ms. McKenzie, unconvincing and not particularly compelling, perhaps driven by second thoughts about playing a “low woman” in the picture featuring her first nude scene.

But if that’s the case, she’s not alone in losing her nerve. The film’s daring, its rock-scored punk vibe (Crowe sings, singer Marlon Williams has a role and a song, and rocker Nick Cave’s son is in the cast), the whole “run with the cross-dressing” myth, suggests a picture a lot more challenging and history-upending than Kurzel, in the end, delivers.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence throughout, bloody images, pervasive language, sexual content and some nudity

Cast: George Macay, Essie Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Nicholas Hoult, Earl Cave, Marlon Williams, Charlie Hunnam and Russell Crowe

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, script by Shaun Grant based on the Peter Carey novel. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:05

His feature film writing and directing debut, “Dean,” didn’t end stand-up comic, TV writer and sometime-actor Demetri Martin’s career. But truth be told, I had to look up who the dude was after watching it.

It’s a lifeless, nearly laughless rom-com about grief (kind of) which cast its well-over-40 star as a thirtyish cartoonist looking for love after losing his mother. And whatever assorted off-brand film festivals said about “Dean” and Demetri in it, he’s way out of his depth.

He has the title role, a pen-and-ink cartoonist of “The New Yorker” school, suffering writer’s block and avoiding his widowed dad (Kevin Kline).

But they’re both kind of dodging the grieving process. Dean’s mom died a withering death (we gather), Dean gave up on his fiancé and has gone fetal without curling up in a ball.

Dad? He’s an engineer. He’s working this loss “like a problem to be solved” — reading self-help books, seeing a therapist, but shut-down.

The phone-call dodging can only go on so long. But when they reconnect, they don’t — reconnect.

Dad strains to make jokes about the kid’s ’70s bowl cut — “I haven’t seen your forehead in 15 years.” He says the sorts of awful screenwriting cliches parents say after a break-up.

“I always liked Michelle (Christine Woods). You guys were good together.”

“You should see us apart.”

Dean struggles through his best friend’s wedding, where he has to accept that a boorish dolt has been promoted to “co-best man.” And avoiding Dad’s calls as he preps to sell the New York home Dean grew up in requires extreme measures. He has to fly to LA for an ad agency meeting over using his drawings for a viral body spray campaign.

Beck Bennett of “Saturday Night Live” stands out as a stereotypical hipster “creative,” shallow and insulting and here for a single scene.

But that’s kind of the rule, here. A few players on the periphery make an impression because the leads never do, especially Martin.

Gillian Jacobs (TV’s “Community”) is the fetching blonde Dean spies at a party and upends his plans to stick around and get to know. But her insufferably rude bowl-cut blocker best friend (Ginger Gonzaga) is the one who registers.

The not-late/never-quite-great Zach Braff made better versions of movies like this — thin, sensitive dramedies that lean on their soundtrack like a crutch. “Sensie” alt-pop, Braff called it — quasi-morose, heartfelt ditties which you’ll have to stay through the credits to identify, because they’re more a “Look who’s on my playlist” than any meaningful contribution to the film.

Which staggers along, trying to pair up Dean’s flirtation with Nicky with Dad’s backing into something with his cute new realtor (Mary Steenburgen).

It’s all pro forma, barely an original thought in it. And it’s neither funny nor sweet.

So while the TV work continues (sort of), if you ever wondered “Whatever happened to Demetri Martin,” here it is.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some suggestive material

Cast: Demetri Martin, Kevin Kline, Gillian Jacobs, Mary Steenburgen, Rory Scovel, Ginger Gonzaga and Beck Bennett

Credits: Written and directed by Demetri Martin. A BS Films.Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33