You know, ever since at least THE NICE GUYS, the world has gotten to fall in love with funny Ryan Gosling. He’s a favorite SNL host, he was unmatchable in BARBIE, it looks like he’ll be fun in THE FALL GUY. Even though he’s done serious broody guy movies in between (BLADE RUNNER 2049, FIRST MAN) I think of him as that funny guy now. And sometimes I forget that’s maybe the third or fourth incarnation of Gosling.

I never knew of him in chapter 1, Canadian Child Star Ryan Gosling, but yeah, in the ‘90s he was on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, he was on episodes of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Goosebumps, and did you know he played the title role in a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys called Young Hercules? Lasted one season. Otherwise the career went better than Old Hercules.

After the turn of the millennium he was reborn as Adult Actor Ryan Gosling. I never saw THE BELIEVER, but it gave him a grown up career. He did various respectable indies, but he blew up so big in THE NOTEBOOK that there’s arguably a separate chapter of Heartthrob Ryan Gosling.

Admittedly I was a late adopter, I didn’t really start paying attention until Quiet Tough Guy Ryan Gosling was unleashed in DRIVE and continued in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES and ONLY GOD FORGIVES. It was during that period, in 2014, that he made his writing/directing debut, LOST RIVER, which is in kind of a similar dreamy dark art movie vein.

Gosling doesn’t act in the movie, but the cast includes his DRIVE co-star Christina Hendricks (THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT), his PLACE BEYOND THE PINES co-stars Ben Mendelsohn (KNOWING) and Eva Mendes (URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT), plus Saoirse Ronan (LADY BIRD), who would’ve been his co-star in THE LOVELY BONES if he hadn’t been fired for showing up having gained 60 pounds without telling Peter Jackson. LOST RIVER makes sense as the directorial debut of an actor who’s been working closely with Nicolas Winding Refn – he even used DRIVE production designer Beth Mickle and costume designer Erin Benach, as well as BRONSON composer Johnny Jewel – but it put me more in mind of Harmony Korine, maybe some Werner Herzog, some David Lynch, and actually some Cronenberg. David or Brandon. Cinematographer Benoit Debie regularly works with Gaspar Noe (including the astounding work on ENTER THE VOID) and Korine (SPRING BREAKERS), while one of the editors, Valdís Óskarsdóttir, did THE CELEBRATION and JULIEN DONKEY BOY. So that’s the road he’s trying to go down, I think. It’s gloomy and surreal but very improvisatory, definitely seems written around the interesting locations, and sometimes people, they found around Detroit.

Bones (Iain De Caestecker, OVERLORD) is a young man who lives in a town outside of Detroit called Lost River, that has been almost entirely abandoned. Most of his neighbors have moved away, and their houses are being demolished. He lives in a crumbling house with his mother Billy (Hendricks) and toddler brother Franky, and is trying to fix up a car to leave town in.

Billy is out of work, victim of a predatory bank loan, and is about to lose the house. One die she learns the guy who talked her into it was fired, and her financial future depends on Dave (Mendelsohn), who’s “been brought in to consolidate some of these branches.” We hear him singing to himself in the other room while she waits nervously in his office. When he comes in he’s hostile and condescending while half-assedly trying to pass it off as blunt but practical. Then he insinuatingly gives her a business card with a supposed job opportunity. A potently despicable figure.

Lost River seems straight up post-apocalyptic. Bones spends his days climbing through abandoned buildings, schools and zoos, hammering through walls and scavenging copper wiring to trade for used car parts, never encountering anybody except when he has to run from a sort of neighborhood warlord named Bully (Matt Smith, MORBIUS) who has declared ownership of the city and patrols around looking for the person stealing his copper. I didn’t recognize Smith at first with his soccer hooligan shaved head and shiny track suit. His toadie Face (Torrey Wigfield) drives him around in a Cadillac convertible with a La-Z-Boy attached to the back for him to sit in like a throne or stand in front of, broadcasting threats and declarations across the neighborhood like he’s Lord Humungus.

Note that Bully isn’t just his descriptive name on the credits – everybody calls him Bully like it’s a normal name.

One day Bones finds the flooded entrance to a tunnel. His girlfriend Rat (Ronan) says it must be “that town at the bottom of the reservoir… they flooded a bunch of towns when they dammed the river.” Her grandma (Barbara Steele, BLACK SUNDAY) used to live there and hasn’t spoken since. Rat says “an evil spell was cast on Lost River, that’s why this whole place feels like it’s underwater too.” I like the dreaminess of this bizarre local origin story that Bones has somehow never heard of. Rat is able to prove it by digging out her 8mm print of an educational film about it.

Bully is a scary dude, especially in a scene where Rat has to accept a ride home from him to distract him from catching Bones. Also when he cuts Face’s lips off with scissors. But Dave is even scarier. Mendelsohn plays him with a simmering menace, nothing over the top, which makes him so much more sickening. It starts with little things like the condescending way he tells her to speak up because he’s deaf in one ear, even when trying to converse with her at the loud night club. And of course he escalates.

But Billy is desperate enough to accept his invitation, which requires a long cab ride to somewhere “closer than somewhere over the rainbow, let’s put it that way.” You fear it’s gonna be some kind of sex work, but it’s weirder – a depraved cabaret where the most popular act is Cat (Mendes), who comes out on stage, dances a little, and is fake stabbed to death, splattering blood on the faces of men applauding in the front. Dave brags that he sets up a place like this “every time I come to one of these town’s that’s imploding.” Seems to think he’s providing an important public service.

Generally when people compare a movie to Cronenberg they mean it has body horror. Not me. I mentioned him because of the side hustle that goes on here, this place’s equivalent of the dancers having to do lap dances (or more) to get the real money. If she’s willing, Billy can go downstairs to “The Shells” – private rooms with transparent plastic body-shaped chambers the women stand inside while a man pays to “let off their frustrations and not worry about hurting anyone.” When she asks if it’s dangerous Cat says “Mmm… if the door’s locked you’re fine. Yeah. Door’s locked you’re good.” Not too reassuring.

I love those sorts of futuristic-ish concepts that seem too bizarre to really happen any time soon and yet very accurate about the sick side of human nature. And then they’re just presented casually like you’re supposed to go “Oh yes, of course. The Shells.”

Sometimes people talk about movies that prioritize atmosphere, mood and imagery over narrative as if that’s an inherent weakness, a mistake, but here it’s part of what the movie is, and what works about it. It’s about those little moments and sights and ideas accumulating into a believable unreality. That approach is often belittled as “style over substance,” and it’s true that style is on display here. The ruins of Detroit drenched in beautiful afternoon sun, the hallways beneath the club drenched in the purplest light you’ve ever seen, surreal images of burning houses and living rooms, all moving to the rhythm of a great soundtrack blending dark synth heartbeats, giallo-theme-licks and haunting old-timey needle drops. (Plus Dave performing “Cool Water” at the club.)

De Caestecker is kind of a blank as Bones. He’s doing a fine job, and if I hadn’t watched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I wouldn’t have guessed that he’s Scottish, but any intensity he may have is dulled by the higher voltage performances all around him. That may be intentional and if not I think it works anyway. When you have a dream you don’t focus on yourself, after all. Bones is our avatar in exploring this nightmare concoction of two parts contemporary misery and one part magical realism. It’s full of beautiful wreckage and overgrowth and poetic images (an unmanned burning bicycle, street lights poking out of the reservoir, Franky and Cat smearing a heart shape on the floor with fake blood) but it’s not just random weirdness. It’s grounded by the actual facts of twenty first century America: a place and time where economic and environmental disaster pile on top of cruel exploitation to annihilate what we were told was gonna be our way of life, and we would give anything for some magic cure to it all. That’s the substance within the style.

Let me show you some samples of how nice this thing looks:

And honestly it looks way better when you see how the camera moves.

Also I have a couple of important notes. #1, the star of the Saturday Night Live Papyrus sketch does indeed put his money where his mouth is when it comes to fonts.

#2, apparently some prop house was still holding onto a Red Triangle Circle Gang skull mask from BATMAN RETURNS.

It’s the same mystery as when I noticed the HALLOWEEN III pumpkin mask in that episode of Knight Rider. Did they say “Oh shit, that’s the skull from BATMAN RETURNS, we gotta use that” or just “this skull here should work”? Not important, but I’m dying to know!

This is a movie outside of its time, though marked by being from that part of Gosling’s career, and by the time when Eva Mendes showed up in cool things like this. She was and is Gosling’s girlfriend/partner, and he said she helped with writing and many other uncredited things. Sadly she was unhappy with the roles she was able to get after that, and decided to retire. As of today LOST RIVER is her last acting role other than voicing a yoga instructor on an episode of Bluey.

Otherwise this might as well be new. I was thinking if Gosling came out with a low-narrative art movie like this now that he’s more of a big time movie star people would think he’d lost his mind, but on second thought maybe people would be more open to it. With some exceptions like Ben Kenigsber in the New York Times and Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, most of the reviews were mixed to negative, usually saying it was empty or was just copying other directors (Lynch and Refn were often mentioned). The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited.” Variety’s Justin Chang, who saw it at Cannes, called it “risible” and said that “trainwreck fascination will go only so far to turn this misguided passion project into an item of even remote commercial interest.”

I suspect there was a belief at that time that Gosling was some vacuous Hollywood meathead, that directing a movie like this could only be a pose, and that he had to be shut down. And maybe now that he’s known more for being a goofball, more people might be open to thinking oh cool, I didn’t know he was into these types of movies. Anyway, one man’s pretentious is another man’s oh, good for him. (I am the second man.)

LOST RIVER is obviously a movie for very specific tastes, but from the reviews I expected something more meandering and unfulfilling. So a decade later it turns out I really dig this one. Good job, old Young Hercules.