The debut feature of writer and director Julian Glander – best known as an artist and animator for Adult Swim, Disney, HBO Max and Cartoon Network – begins with an incursion of something that, even in a mannered milieu, is obviously alien. The film is presented in a highly stylised, Day-Glo-coloured mode of 3D animation that makes all the characters resemble Playmobil figures. Yet the mauvish, sausage-like, vaguely throbbing thing that is washed ashore against a rock looks outlandish and odd. It is certainly noticed by the four boys lollygagging on the beach: Freckles (Grace Kuhlenschmidt), Beatbox (Elsie Fisher), little Peanut (J.R. Phillips) and the older Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett). Yet when Freckles (Grace Kuhlenschmidt) tries to poke it with stick, the strange glowing worm quickly escapes by digging itself into a hole in the ground.
As the boys speculate fancifully as to what it might have been, Billy heads off to do some work. A 16-year-old mathematical genius who has dropped out of high school, Billy is now rushing food from takeaway restaurants to customers’ doors for Grubster Delivery, and hoping to raise $5000 both so he can pay back his sister Gail (Eva Victor) for letting him live in her garage, and and so he can finally afford to move out and on. “There’s money to be made out there”, says Billy, fixated on his dream – the American dream – of rising from nothing to something and getting a place of his own. Billy is a materialist and a capitalist, and if he supposes that he has found a loophole that will allow him to multiply his earnings, he is going to learn that the house always wins and the system cannot be beaten. Yet he will also encounter another strange creature, not unlike the worm on the beach only more torus-shaped – and this child-like Donut will have Billy reassessing what he truly values, even over filthy lucre.
As Billy’s delivery work brings him into touch with an elderly chicken-rearing woman (Cole Escola), a committed hot dog maker (Chris Fleming), the owner of a dinosaur-themed mini-golf course (Joe Pera), a customer who likes his food pre-chewed (Max Wittert), a motel client obsessed with spaghetti (Tevi Gevinson), and the owner of an experimental citrus grove (Janeane Garofalo) and her daughter (Miya Folick), he finds his horizons being broadened as to what motivates and moves his fellow Americans in a world that, though certainly consumerist, is not always as measurable and rational as he at first imagines.
Punctuated with surreal interludes and songs, Boys Go To Jupiter offers a strange delivery-route coming of age in the Florida Everglades, letting Billy, on the cusp of adulthood, have his first contact with death and other kinds of transgression. Billy may not yet realise it in his dogged pursuit of monetary gain, but what he really seeks is a loving replacement for his decidedly unloving, estranged mother. Ultimately he might not quite make it to Jupiter, but he ends up somewhere equally alien, and much more like home – a place of underground values and primal principles of family, buried far beneath the superficies of American life, if still ruled by similar appetites.
Boys Go To Jupiter shows at the 24th REC Tarragona International Film Festival.
