Jack and Diane Review
By David Kempler
Not Even a Little Ditty
Young love, lesbian style, wasn't enough for Director Bradley Rust Gray. Why confine yourself to a potentially good and well-enough acted love story, when you can destroy it by trying to add in a horror element that makes absolutely no sense. In the middle of a normal flow of logic, Gray repeatedly injects moments that play like scenes from the television show "House".
On that show, whenever the brilliant doctor's theories are being explained, we are thrust into the internal organs of a patient and watch cells run amok. It makes sense there. In "Jack and Diane", out of nowhere we witness internal organs with what appears to be strands of hair roaming around. Why? Who knows? By the time we are halfway into "Jack and Diane", the question becomes, "Who cares?"
Diane (Juno Temple) is an adorable looking girl who might be being guided by alien forces considering her constant odd choices of behavior. We never find out why she behaves the way she does. We just marvel at how illogical and without reason she behaves. One gets the feeling that if we were to crack her skull open it would be questionable whether there would be enough brain matter to support human life.
She meets Jack (Riley Keough), a skateboard-toting bad-girl type. Oddly, as much as she likes to carry the skateboard, I don't believe she ever rides it. They kiss and fall madly in love. They kiss some more and then Diane gets repeated nosebleeds. I think this is somehow tied in with what may or may not be the odd scenes taking place within a human body, but that's only a guess on my part.
There are some moments in "Jack and Diane" that feel like real young love and exploration. It's a shame that the director felt he had to inject a whole bunch of needless filler that meant something to him, even if it will never mean a blasted thing to any of us.
