The Sweet East Is a Provocative Odyssey through the East Coast

My favorite part of Sean Price Williams’ feature directorial debut, The Sweet East, was the journey it took through my lifelong home in the beautiful Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. 

I felt a swell of pride when Lillian (Talia Ryder)—at this point in the story going by Annabel—travels by beat-up bus alongside a group of wannabe activist gutter punks across highways. She goes from Baltimore to Washington D.C., perceives the skyline of Philadelphia, then heads into Trenton, New Jersey, where she meets a neo-Nazi named Lawrence (Simon Rex). Lawrence lives in New Hope, PA, a semi-rural, wealthy town on the PA-NJ border where I spent a lot of time while growing up closer to Philly. From there, Lillian’s odyssey takes her into New York City, my current home, then upstate, then into the rich autumnal foliage of New England, where my parents currently live and where some of my family is from. She eventually makes it all the way to Vermont, before the absconding and deceptive high schooler’s adventurous tryst concludes, and she’s booted back to her real home of South Carolina. 

For me, it’s hard to imagine living anywhere other than, um, well, “The Sweet East,” an area of the country whose populations are often infamously designated in political and social flashpoint discourse as “coastal elites.” But longtime cinematographer Williams’ film (written by author and film critic Nick Pinkerton) attempts to illustrate and skewer the melting pot of viewpoints and cultures which form the East Coast’s reality, and which bounce off our passive, rubbery protagonist as she moves up the Atlantic seaboard—all merely fodder for her to exploit to form new connections in her escape from the South. 

After abandoning a class field trip to D.C. in the middle of the night (and getting caught amidst an amateur sting operation that mirrors Pizzagate, perpetrated by a man played by Andy Milonakis), Lillian decides to hitch a ride with a gang of Baltimore-based pseudo-anarchists by way of Caleb (Earl Cave). Caleb is a self-described “artivist” whose dick and balls are run through with so many metal knobs that his genitals really do look like, as Lillian tauntingly describes them, Swiss cheese.

After she accompanies the group to a charmingly failed protest of some kind, in what turns out to be a nature reserve, Lillian stumbles upon a white nationalist gathering where she meets Lawrence, a soft-spoken, articulate history nerd who adorns his guest bed with a swastika-laden duvet. Wary of Lawrence at first, Lillian manages to wriggle her way into a temporary stay at Lawrence’s inherited New Hope residence, an antique dollhouse where they embark upon a perverse if strictly platonic relationship which alternates between sugar daddy/baby, father/daughter, and Lolita/Humbert Humbert. Rex plays Lawrence uproariously, partly augmented by the stark contrast to his recent breakout role (Sean Baker’s Red Rocket) as well as his real-life, boisterous persona. But it’s impossible not to snort when Rex calmly pushes his comically large reading glasses up his nose or starts explaining to Lillian how America is “actually, a very young country.”

As Lillian hops from place to place, she alters her backstory with each new acquaintance, taking directly from the previous place and people she just came from. Ryder masks Lillian’s clever intent with a façade alternating between being blasé and girlish naïve. She is not necessarily becoming the people she meets or gleaning anything meaningful from each experience beyond them being stepping stones for a new escapade in a new location—in New Hope, she’s from Baltimore; in New York City, she’s from New Jersey. 

In New York, she has her own Being There moment (or one, honestly, probably closer in premise to this year’s Fool’s Paradise) when two filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri, both delightful) poach her off the city street and misguidedly deem her an acting genius, propelling her into celebrity stardom and making front page tabloids with her screen-partner-turned-boyfriend Ian (Jacob Elordi). In Vermont, she’s a sounding board for Mohammed (Rish Shah) as he espouses tangents on the beauty of nature and hides her from his ardently Muslim brother, a character vaguely implied to be an extremist in an annoyingly, tiptoed-around sort of way but whose interests seem to only include group dancercise and EDM.

There’s a homespun quality to The Sweet East, in no small part obliged by the grainy, glistening 16mm film it was shot on (unsurprisingly, by Williams himself). It is dreamlike, like the images I pull from my memories of times spent around the very places the film was shot. Its use of mixed media—brief animation, matte paintings, and a giant alien puppet that I think is meant to be, like, a real guy—add to the overall quality of an absurd, lawless, heightened world. It’s often a very unpleasant world to exist in, but it settles a bit as the story goes on and Lillian herself settles into her designs of escape. 

It’s difficult to collect exactly what Pinkerton and Williams are endeavoring to articulate about the varying, clashing niches of modern political fractures and social issues other than a feeling of frenetic, fuming chaos—a general sense of disorder and disarray. Perhaps that’s the point. The country is, after all, very divided. But it leaves one feeling like the filmmakers are unwilling to commit to a genuine ideology beyond an attempt to poke the bear. I found myself oscillating between being impressed by The Sweet East and feeling like it was trying very hard to impress me.

And it did, though probably less than it intended. Maybe it was just how the gray skies looked with the cozy fuzz of 16mm, in that particular way the skies look here when summer turns to fall, but I found myself taken by this hectic yet elegant Mid-Atlantic pilgrimage, which reminded me just how much I love where I’ve come from. Still, it is interesting to consider how all sorts of America’s token, cross-country viewpoints can be found on this seeming “elite, out-of-touch coast.” The rich, well-to-do suburb of Philly in which I once worked at the Gap, in the same county as New Hope, had a notoriously robust margin of Trump voters, and that’s still hours away from the truly right-leaning, rural area of Pennsylvania which makes up the derogatorily named “Pennsyltucky.” Lillian ultimately meets with all the flashpoint factions like markers on her magical journey of self-actualization: The dirtbag left, the MAGA guys, the extremists, the brainless pop artists. Having come from an ostensibly poor family in the South, it’s there that, suddenly, all these issues and people seem incredibly far away and imaginary, even if they’re all blowing each other’s heads off in upstate New York. It’s a nihilistic perspective, but it’s kind of beautiful that you can find such diversity of cultures on The Sweet East.

Director: Sean Price Williams
Writer: Nick Pinkerton
Starring: Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi, Rish Shah
Release Date: October 10, 2023 (New York Film Festival)

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.