Film

“You just expound your intellectual bullshit and make everyone feel uncomfortable,” pouts wanna-be rocker Scott (Sexton III) at his friend and amateur “writer” Bobby (Rice). Earlier, Scott gets the same blunt treatment from his girlfriend, who informs him that his songwriting is garbage. These scathing accusations nicely frame writer/director Blitstein’s sobering message about East Village twentysomethings who overestimate their so-called creative talents.
It may be hard to stomach yet another 90 minutes of privileged and promiscuous bedhead hipsters who roam the city regurgitating what they learned in freshman English, but this film at least features an entertaining cast. Galligan (Gremlins) plays a hack playwright who flaunts his marginal successes in as slimy a manner as we can recall. Scott’s girlfriend (Binkley) perfectly embodies the supportive partner whose patience is pushed to the edge, and even Rent-head Rapp provides a poignant cameo.

Chirp vividly reminds us of Jane Spencer’s spare 1991 gem Little Noises, which starred Crispin Glover in the role of a hilariously dim writer who’s never produced a word in his life. While Blitstein’s humorous world of talentless bohemians gets obscured by its countless romantic subplots and ersatz-arty dialogue, Spencer presented her losers raw and even more humane. Their lifelike inability to create art forcibly stirred the “wanna-be” in us all—the sad epiphany that eludes Blitstein’s script in his promising feature debut.