There was a time when Sundance offered up eccentric young misfits regularly — think Dawn Wiener of “Welcome to the Dollhouse” or Napoleon Dynamite. “Run Amok” hero Meg fits squarely in this tradition, so if you love the idea of a darkly comic high school musical, this one may have been made for you.
Newcomer Alyssa Marvin revisits her role from NB Mager’s 2023 short film of the same name. (A striking number of former shorts have arrived at the festival as full-length features this year.) You’ll know just what kind of movie we’re talking about when you learn that Meg, a friendless freshman who lives with her stern aunt (Molly Ringwald) and cooler cousin (Sophia Torres), drags her full-size harp back and forth to school every day. She speaks like an adult who was raised in the 1950s, dresses like a preteen in 1980 and grips her pencils with full-fist ferocity. She’s clearly brilliant and very obviously in pain.
Though the costumes, cars and home decor suggest a period film, the source of Meg’s sorrow indicates that this story is entirely contemporary. Ten years ago, her mother — an art teacher — was one of several victims at a school shooting. Now Meg attends that school, which is about to present an anniversary commemoration.
Rather than being horrified by the idea, she goes all-in. She organizes a full-length musical about the event, walking her cast through the violent details, choreographing dances to songs like Britney Spears’ “(Hit Me) …Baby One More Time,” and even sleeping over at the late shooter’s house, after having dinner with his mother (Elizabeth Marvel).
Meg insists that her musical is intended to bring the community “catharsis” (a concept defined to her by a teacher as “an enema, but for your heart”). But, of course, she’s the one who needs to find her way through a decade-long wound that hasn’t yet started healing. And Marvin is fully committed to this tricky role; as a stubborn iconoclast who is also suffering enormously, Meg has to remain irritating but likable. She’s so smart that smaller minds drive her crazy, but so socially unskilled that she makes people nuts. For the most part, Marvin handles the balance well and our affection for Meg grows as the film unfurls.
The rest of the cast struggles a little more; it often feels as though they were left to decide how to play their roles. So Bill Camp and Margaret Cho are frenetic as an unbalanced teacher and Meg’s overwhelmed principal, while Ringwald is stonily impassive as her aunt. Patrick Wilson plays Meg’s sympathetic teacher with understated gravity, and Marvel seems to be in another movie altogether, as the shooter’s shell-shocked mother.
The script and pacing are similarly uneven, with wacky comedy sitting brazenly next to solemn tragedy. Fortunately, Mager has imbued even the broadest moments with evident empathy. And her bravado, like Meg’s, is undeniably bracing: This country’s hopeless approach to gun violence is nothing if not surreal, so why not treat it that way? It has become ever clearer that the adults have no idea what they’re doing. Perhaps a generation of Megs will one day lead us out of our mess.
