In writer-director Gregory Kohn’s Northeast, we watch Will (David Call) hang out on the streets and in the cramped apartments of New York: We watch him eat an apple as daytime traffic swooshes between him and the 16mm camera. We watch him smoke a cigarette against the fuzzy city lights at night. We watch him stare out a window into the lemon-colored light of dawn. We even watch his space heater warm up with an electric glow and buzz.
Although just 76 minutes, Northeast is padded with enough of these bouts of navel-gazing to make one wonder whether the material would have been better suited as a short. But the answer is no, for as irritating as his exposition-less cinema vérité style is—the grainy, hand-held camera serves as an additional character whose ability to maintain a stable image declines in direct correlation to Will and his friends’ level of inebriation—Kohn’s thematically autobiographical script builds to an emotional impression that, rather than being unique, is notable in being increasingly universal.
Educated, unemployed and relatively new to the city, Will spends his days wandering the streets, largely alone. He has a roommate with whom he engages in awkwardly polite conversation. He goes to parties where he doesn’t remember other guests’ names (we don’t either) while anonymous girls flirt with and fuss over him. He hooks up with women for one-night stands, painfully aware of how cliché he sounds when he says, “I’ll call you. I will.”
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