Men will be boys in filmmaker Evan Glodell's debut---giggly, overgrown adolescents who shoot propane tanks, build flamethrowers from scratch and obsess over The Road Warrior. The dream of the film's two male BFFs---clownish fuckup Aiden (Dawson) and withdrawn Woodrow (Glodell)---is to roam the Armageddon-scarred wasteland in a tricked-out muscle car. Until civilization ends, however, they'll tool around modern-day Los Angeles, a postapocalyptic cityscape in its own right. Into this testosteronized bubble enters Millie (Wiseman), a beer-swilling blond; after a meet-cute involving cricket-eating and road-tripping, she and Woodrow become an item. Fast-forward several months: The romance goes rancid. Woodrow suffers a broken heart and, concurrently, a head trauma. Then things start to get weird.
Given Bellflower's bruised full-frontal dude-ity (no film has nailed the aggressive guyness of gearhead culture better), it'd be easy to view this indie as some missive delivered from the He-Man Women Haters Club. But once the film goes into revenge mode, you can sense the writer-director-star chipping away at the male necessity for macho posturing. And though the film's climax eventually devolves from fever-dream chaos to cop-out, its coda---in which Warrior's Lord Humungus is declared the masculine ideal---drives home the notion that boyhood dreamworlds are adult dead ends. In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom.
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Read our interview with director Evan Glodell
Watch the trailer