(Dialectic)
Dialectic, 2022. Drama. 94 min.
Grade: 4 out of 4
One of the toughest things about being an only child is that when your parents completely, utterly fail you, there’s nobody around who can confirm your suspicions and just go, “Dude. Our parents are nuts.” Your norms are skewed, especially if, like me, you lived in a different culture from either parent, and couldn’t connect with the outer world for any kind of baseline. For the 24 years I lived as an only child, I imagined situations where a sibling and I might be able to connect about such things. Stay Awake, while depicting a parental situation nobody would envy, depicts a brotherly coping bond many would.
Derek (model Fin Argus) and Ethan (Wyatt Oleff, familiar as Stan Uris in the It movies) have the routine down. They know their mother Michelle (This Is Us‘ Chrissy Metz) is going to zonk out on pills by the end of the day, they know the places she’s likely to be found unconscious, and by the time they drag her to the ER the doctors know what to do every time. The movie’s title comes from the songs the boys sing to try to keep her conscious as they force her to recall which movies the tunes come from.
They must have amazing health insurance – ERs aren’t cheap, even in Langford, VA — because they also still have a pretty decent house from which mom apparently makes money packaging and shipping women’s underwear. Her method of feeding the addiction is simple: she keeps mixing blood from a pricked finger into the urine samples she gives her doctor, and he keeps writing the scrips.
Derek, the elder, wants to be an actor, and indeed, has a small career starring in regional commercials, a mirror of Argus’ own career as a child actor and member of Kidz Bop. Ethan wants to be an English major, which everyone except his mother jokes will be a useless career. Mom’s quite supportive when she’s not high, but even nightly bouts at death’s door can’t stop her from continuing the pattern. Their town of Langford is one of those that looks both picture perfect and like an absolute dead-end for young adults – Ethan and Derek work at the ice cream stand and bowling alley, respectively, which look like almost the only businesses in town besides the hospital and a theater potently featuring a marquee that reads, “The Best Is Yet to Come.”
Small-town misery and addiction are common subgenres of indie film, and it’s a real trick to find the positive in material like that. Writer-director Jamie Sisley, adapting his 2015 short film of the same name, finds it in the brotherly love. Ethan and Derek aren’t sitcom-perfect – Ethan’s full of anger and thinks Derek is too willing to forgive their mother every transgression – but they know they’re each other’s best allies in the world, and never forget it.
When Derek lines up a big audition callback on the same day mom’s getting out of her latest rehab, it’s a contrivance that we know won’t lead anywhere good, but Sisley has another trick up his sleeve after that – a beat cleverly planted in a way the viewer may not have noticed.
There’s an absent father unseen in the story, and we watch the fallout of it all in Ethan and Derek’s relationships with high school girlfriends – which is a bit creepy in Derek’s case, since he has graduated already. Derek’s coping mechanism is, as his girl Melanie (Cree Cicchino) notes, to “have to put a bow on everything,” Ethan, conversely, keeps a lot to himself, including his college plans, which puts a great strain on his relationship with coworker Ashley (Quinn McColgan). When Ethan talks frankly to his mother it’s unsurprising; when Derek finally opens up a little bit about how difficult she is, it’s like quiet thunder.
It is perhaps the best compliment to the cast that, though many of them have length resumes, they feel like real locals being themselves. Being less familiar with the TV shows they’ve been on, I didn’t bring in any pre-conceived recognition; others will, and I wonder how that will alter how they see the film, if at all. True, they’re all slightly better looking than the average rural Virginian (I can say that because my father was one!), but Argus and Oleff are plausible brothers, and the former, while handsome in a natural way, certainly doesn’t seem like someone you’d expect to see in a fashion spread. As the pill-popping matriarch, Metz looks quite young – we’re told she got pregnant at 19, but she still seems to have been cast under the Hollywood stereotype mindset that fat people somehow inherently look older. Regardless, she brings a sweetness to the role that makes you see in her what Derek does; that innocent side almost oblivious to what her dark, drug-addled subconscious and lack of will is doing to harm everyone.
It’s hard to envision a satisfactory ending that isn’t just a maintenance of the status quo, yet Sisley brilliantly pulls it off. It’s as low-key impressive as everything else about Stay Awake, a film whose title could have been Heaven-sent to snarky critics, but instead describes what you absolutely will do throughout.