Downtown Owl Is a Desolate, Unconvincing Klosterman Adaptation

In Downtown Owl, an adaptation of the first novel by pop-cultural gadfly Chuck Klosterman, Julia (Lily Rabe) arrives in a small North Dakota town with low expectations. They’re unintentionally confirmed by locals, whose friendly rundown itemizes a whopping three bars and a movie theater that’s about to close; there’s barely any pop culture for anyone to ruminate on, Klosterman-style. Julia is in Owl to teach high school English for a semester, and make some money in a low-cost living situation while giving her husband some space to complete his graduate program. What Julia doesn’t seem to expect is a chance to relive multiple decades of her younger life. She’s thrust back into her 20s with a quick descent into social alcoholism, and maybe further back by the high-school-centric environment of both her day job and her nightlife. Julia’s new friend Naomi (Vanessa Hudgens), whose husband is closer at hand than Julia’s but similarly unseen for the entire film, advises that, as a new arrival, Julia will be observed with “homecoming glasses.”

When they first meet, Julia asks if Naomi’s rat-a-tat stageplay-style banter is actual conversation, or something she’s doing “for an audience.” Naomi, a character whose cartoonish single note nonetheless qualifies her as the most compelling in the film, understands that there’s no real point in differentiating between the two. Doesn’t this sound like a funny, observant movie? This film version of Downtown Owl, a 15-year-old novel that does not exactly inspire constant 2023 conversation, is obviously a passion project; Rabe and her partner Hamish Linklater co-direct it from Linklater’s screenplay. Yet despite its rueful musings on the time that passes whether or not you’re properly occupying yourself, and despite the clear passion Rabe and Linklater exhibit for this material, Downtown Owl persists in a kind of circular ramble. It’s so transfixed by the process of muddling through that the movie itself becomes an indistinct muddle of its own.

Part of the problem, sorry to say, is Rabe’s go-for-broke performance as Julia, which somehow occupies enough space to take over the movie without steering it in a particular direction. The novel, from my understanding, provides equal time to Mitch (August Blanco Rosenstein), a conflicted football-player student of Julia’s, and Horace (Ed Harris), an old-timer townie caring for his incapacitated wife. Here, Horace is mostly Julia’s window into Owl’s past, while Mitch is an avatar of its potentially dead-end future. It’s a neat enough bit of character design, but Rabe’s nerd-turned-wild-child regression turns strangely opaque. Instead of beguiling us with thrilling recklessness or unspoken tragedy, she prompts nagging logistical questions, like why she repeatedly brushes off salacious gossip about her transparently dopey and condescending co-worker Coach Laidlaw (Finn Wittrock) and local student Tina (Arden Michalec) with a mystifying conviction that Laidlaw seems like too good a guy to do what sadly many charismatic authority figures do with their young charges. Julia’s character is also weighed down by an endless infatuated with Vance Druid (Henry Golding), a local legend for reasons eventually revealed as both amusingly convoluted and overblown. That backstory, though, turns him into a conceit in search of an insight (which, frankly, fits some of Klosterman’s self-satisfied pop-culture argument-starters as well).