I can't imagine I'll be more aggravated by another performance this year than I was by Andrea Riseborough's in this movie.

I'll never complain about a movie trying to give us something we haven't seen before, so credit where credit is due. But this film is a misfire from top to bottom. Set in a hyper-artificial world that reads like a love child between John Waters and David Lynch, the film is full of anger, frustration, and sadness about being forced into social norms that don't fit. I like the concept on paper, but this movie is intolerable. Nobody felt like a real character, nothing happening felt like it had any urgency, everything felt exaggerated and arbitrary. Riseborough is the worst offender -- why deliver a line like a normal human being when you can instead grimace and mug and throw yourself on the floor for no conceivable reason. But nobody comes out of this movie unscathed. The only scenes that featured characters having actual conversations of any substance sounded like gender identity podcasts.

It was like this movie was trying from the outset to be a cult classic, not understanding that cult classics can't be manufactured. I very much disliked it.

Grade: D.

Amanda Kramer's (Ladyworld) new film takes place in 1950s Manhattan - maybe not our version of that time and place, but a neon world of music and dance - where Arthur (Harry Melling) and Suze (Andrea Riseborough) - he's a clarinetist, she's a housewife - witness a murder committed by a gang of rough trade greasers in leather known as the Young Gents. That act of violence sparks previously unknown emotions and feelings of sexuality in both of them.

"Everyone wants to be Stanley Kowalski," Suze says at one point. This movie lives up to that promise, creating a world where the gang movies of the 1950s are real-life, complete with more fashion and queer content than any movie of that era would dare (well, sometimes in subtext).

A film festival referred to this movie as "A Streetcar Named Desire by way of John Waters."

That's a high mark to rise to but this movie goes for it.

Kenneth Anger might be pleased to see that his influence continues, while certainly jealous of the budget. And oh wow - Demi Moore in a pantsuit, animal print coat and silver high heels, living in a blue fantasy world apartment as a kept woman?

Watch this and prepare to swoon.

This film was a failed, poorly executed, pretentious and amateur attempt at being different and avant-garde á la Kenneth Anger/David Lynch/John Waters/West Side Story with the elements of the queer culture and woke politics.

PROS:

• The underrated-yet-top-notch and stellar performances of Andrea Riseborough, Karl Glusman, Cole Escola and Ryan Simpkins.

• The beautifully appealing and well-designed visuals/art direction and costumes/makeup.

• The haunting-yet-elegant original musical score.

• The overhyped and unconvincingly awful performances of Harry Melling and Demi Moore due to miscasting.

• The painfully obvious and downright abysmal dialogue.

• The very tedious, redundant and chaotic nature of the entire plot, storyline and screenplay.

• The anachronistic and nonsensical elements of 1980's-style harshly bright neon lights and dramatic dry ice smoke in a 1950's setting.

• The film itself being reduced to an annoying and boring college lecture of a gender studies course with an even painfully obvious agenda of wokeism and degeneracy of far-leftist dogmas.

• The poor play of lighting and darkness throughout the entire film.

• The rather nonexistent and confusing message of the story.