Stream It or Skip It: ‘Downtown Owl’ on Netflix, a Chuck Klosterman Adaptation By Way Of Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater

Chuck Klosterman is known primarily for his music journalism and pop-culture essays, but he’s also an occasional novelist, and published his debut novel Downtown Owl in 2008. Now partners Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater have collaborated on an adaptation of the book, written by Linklater and starring Rabe as a high school English teacher new to a small North Dakota town full of eccentrics, disappointment, and the occasional broken dream.

DOWNTOWN OWL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Chuck Klosterman’s novel Downtown Owl, as I understand it, divides its attention between three characters inhabiting the fictional small North Dakota town of Owl, whose titular downtown features – back in the fall of 1983 – three bars, one OK grocery store, a hardware shop, and an about-to-close movie theater. In this film adaptation, Julia (Rabe), who sets up in Owl temporarily to teach high school English while her husband finishes his graduate degree, is much more central to the story than Mitch (August Blanco Rosenstein), one of her teenage students, and Horace (Ed Harris), an Owl old-timer she befriends. Mitch and Horace are essentially supporting characters on either side of Julia’s thirtysomething vantage point, informing how she looks at Owl, which becomes a place where she relives her younger, wilder days. In other words, the movie is mostly about Julia going to bars and haphazardly taking stock of her life, and whether it’s really gone as she hoped.

What Will It Remind You Of? Mostly, it will remind Klosterman readers of what it might be like to hang out in a bar with him and listen to Elvis Costello, even if the town of Owl doesn’t offer enough popular culture to nourish the kinds of extensive debates he favors in his essays. There are also hints of the arrested-development, Gen X-meets-millennial comedies of Noah Baumbach, though not nearly so sharp or laugh-out-loud funny, and possibly also some Hold Steady songs, though, well, same.

Performance Worth Watching: This is clearly intended as a showcase for Rabe, but it’s Ed Harris who feels most lived-in as Horace, an unofficial keeper of Owl history who is also caring for his incapacitated spouse; it seems clear that he could have carried more of the film than it ultimately asks him to. Vanessa Hudgens also hits the right heightened notes as Julia’s co-worker Naomi.

Memorable Dialogue: There are some odd, catchy moments where the characters slip into what sounds like direct-camera address, like when Naomi announces: “When I was 19, I was a sex kitten. When I’m 59, I’ll be 60 pounds overweight. Now, I’m 33 and you’re getting drunk with me.” “Was that to me, or to some audience, or…?” Julia asks. 

Sex and Skin: Sexuality permeates Julia’s evenings, as her status as a presentable new-in-town blonde girl without a wedding ring makes her a star attraction at the bars, and she forms a lusty crush on enigmatic local Vance Druid (Henry Golding). But the horniness never really translates into more than a vibe; this is a talk-heavy, action-light movie.

Our Take: Lily Rabe really puts herself out there with Downtown Owl, delivering a go-for-broke performance that, unfortunately, does wind up going broke. Part of it isn’t her fault: She resembles her mother Jill Clayburgh to an eerie enough degree that sometimes her character Julia feels like she’s being played by a deepfake. But Rabe did also co-direct this movie, which labors so intensively to jazz up its sometimes lonesome, underpopulated setting that its star has to go big to compete. The result is a movie that often feels like it’s killing time until its lead character gets to have some big meltdown moments in the final stretch, attempting to confer some meaning upon the aimless scenes of thirtysomething drifting, teenage angst, the occasional bit of old-guy wisdom. The movie is most awkward at entwining the story of a hard-partying English teacher with her students (of which there often appear to be vanishingly few, even for a small town). Neither Julia’s fleeting connections with them nor the occasional and deeply specific hostility she faces feel particularly believable, or, for that matter, eventful; the big dramatic event of the final 10 minutes feels obligatory and predictable. Maybe this can all be traced back to Klosterman’s material; some novels just don’t lend themselves well to 90-minute films.

Our Verdict: SKIP IT. Downtown Owl has a certain offbeat charm simply by virtue of telling a story that Hollywood studios don’t often bother with, adapting a novel that’s obviously more about character and atmosphere than plot. But the movie’s fidgety impatience with itself makes it feel increasingly insufferable.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Downtown Owl