O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to SHREDDER ORPHEUS and SIX STRING SAMURAI, so I support it.

An apocalypse has happened. Something called plasma (a rainbow colored oil-like substance) has poisoned the earth. But people still have farms and stuff. O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, FEAR STREET PARTs TWO and THREE) is a young woman who lives on one with her mother Calliope (Bree Elrod, RED ROCKET). She has a guitar made of junk and, like Pearl but not psychotic, she’s lonely enough to perform for a scarecrow.

Calliope discourages O’Dessa’s musical ambitions, because O’Dessa’s father Vergil (Pokey LaFarge, THE LONE RANGER) and five generations before him were what they call “ramblers.” Vergil took off one day to travel around playing music, never to return. Some deadbeat shit right there, but sounds amazing to O’Dessa, a regular pre-aunt-and-uncle-being-burned-alive Luke Skywalker.

Well, her mother doesn’t get torched, but she does die, so what the hell is O’Dessa gonna do, stay on the farm? No way. I like the mythical nature of it. Her father’s guitar was carved from a tree hit by lightning, a woman with no eyes told him a prophecy about a seventh son. When he died they brought the guitar home in a coffin. Now O’Dessa literally digs it up, burns down the house, switches her look from farm girl to rockabilly and gets to ramblin’ like she always dreamed.

They probly don’t have L.A. or Nashville anymore, so she heads to Satylite City, a scary place ruled over by a TV demagogue called Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, OPUS). He’s a ridiculous TV host fascist so of course you gotta consider him kind of a Trump figure, but physically he resembles Jordan Peterson. His TV show is kind of a THE RUNNING MAN meets The Voice where they bring dissidents to an island called One-derworld for televised executions or disfigurement/zombifications. But also it’s a The Voice-type talent show searching for someone called The One? he seems to make up the rules as he goes so I wouldn’t bet on anybody ever winning.

On the road to the city O’Dessa meets a band of train hoppers led by Father Walt (Mark Boone Junior, I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER). She’s a naive farm girl so she doesn’t know not to trust any character played by Mark Boone Junior, and when she wakes up her new friends and her guitar have all disappeared. To her immense credit though she immediately finds a junkyard and builds herself a new guitar out of items including a frying pan, a framed photo (of her parents?) and fishing line.

When she does make it into town she spots her stolen guitar in a pawn shop window, and her mission becomes earning enough money to buy it back. She notices a bar that holds a talent show with a cash prize so she heads on in there. I don’t know if she’s clueless or just rightfully confident in her talents, but she seems undaunted by how threatening this place is. It’s run by Neon Dion, an enforcer for Plutonovich who wears two electro-shock knuckle rings and who O’Dessa just saw torture a dissident on a stage in the town square. Busy lady. With the combination of her menace and the world’s harshest bangs I didn’t recognize her as Regina Hall (PAID IN FULL).

But O’Dessa seems more intimidated by the emcee’s intro, a grindy pop-rock performance by Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr., THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, ELVIS). She’s in awe of him. She doesn’t win, but runs into Euri outside afterwards and helps him get away from a sexual harasser. He’s not only a singer but a sex worker, and Dion is his very possessive pimp. He secretly brings O’Dessa to stay in his penthouse apartment in a once fancy hotel, now trashed, but fancy by post-apocalypse standards.

It starts to sink in that O’Dessa is attracted to Euri, and she successfully makes her move. I really didn’t see this turn coming because she seems so young and out of her element, he seems older and being reluctantly protective of her because he feels sorry for her, like a big brother. Also his fashion and job as a hustler seem to code him as gay, while she looks like such an adorable young butch girl trying to act tough, that it didn’t match my assumptions about either of them. But I think that’s intentional and it’s kind of sweet. Despite all the horse shit debate about gender out there in the world of stupid assholes, very obviously people should be able to define themselves, to live and love however the fuck they want to, including a feminine man getting with a masculine woman, and a million other variations.

Also, a larger-than-life forbidden love between passionate young people trying to escape their circumstances is pretty natural material for the heightened world of musicals. So let’s address O’DESSA’s quality as a musical. The songs are written to explain emotions and story points, but most of them are presented as performances – singing to the scarecrow, at an open mic, on the deadly game show. A scene where she’s busking branches into the less literal, and even the regular performances involve fantastical elements like a band of this world’s version of nuns (who wear masks like STAR WARS characters) suddenly joining her solo acoustic performance.

The style is mostly country (more in the listenable old school mode than whatever it’s been during most of my lifetime) with a little rock ’n roll influence at times. I find them to be pretty good songs, though I wouldn’t listen to them outside of the movie. The one really terrible song is when Plutonovich sings about “Onederworld,” and I think it really works for the movie that his song is cheesy and he has to use autotune. It was only after it played on the end credits and then got stuck in my head that I realized how much I hate the song.

This is the second feature for writer/director/composer Geremy Jasper, whose first film PATTI CAKE$ has been recommended to me by at least one of you and I really should get around to that, huh? That one is about a rapper, and for both movies he wrote and produced the songs with his partner Jason Binnick.

I’m more into the sci-fi side than the musical side, and it delivers on some cool visuals. There are pretty big sets for the parts of the city that we see, lots of ominous all-seeing-eye logos representing Plutonovich, retro graphics, costumed extras, neon lights, psychedelic colors, reclaimed junk. I like that these weird futures always have to have a bunch of big-ass TVs lying around. Never flat screens – they just don’t look right for this type of thing. You can’t stack them on top of each other. Besides, you want it to be the future projected from the past, before we knew there were other possibilities for TV shapes. I don’t think this qualifies as cyberpunk, but that’s definitely some of the influence. I definitely see a little bit of Max Headroom in there. And the truth is I’m a sucker for anything that reminds me of Max Headroom in any way.

I don’t think O’DESSA, the movie, ends up being “the one,” but it’s a pretty cool little out-of-nowhere movie that, if not wholly original, is at least novel in that we don’t get this kind of thing very often. And it’s a good showcase for Sink, who clearly sings for real but more impressive to me conveys the distinct quality of a young, timid person gathering enough courage to come out of her shell and stand up to the bastards by holding her head and her guitar high. If young people have to come up in a world of filthy fascism and endless TV talent show competitions they might as well have a cool rock(ish) opera where those two things are combined and the hero beats the show and then burns it down. I appreciate the sentiment.