Alex Strangelove
Description
Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny) is on a quest to lose his virginity, an event eagerly awaited by his patient girlfriend and cheered on with welcome advice by his rowdy friends. But Alex, a super gregarious dude, is oddly unmotivated. A magical house party featuring a lickable psychedelic frog and a lot of Skittles throws Alex into the presence of Elliot (Antonio Marziale, Altered Carbon), a hunky college guy, who pegs Alex as gay and flirts hard. Alex is taken aback but after a series of setbacks on the girlfriend front he takes the plunge and learns some interesting new facts about himself. The next steps are tough on Alex and form both the emotional core of the film and provide a teaching moment about how the “coming out” film has evolved as society has changed in its attitude towards homosexuality. This material is deftly and cleverly handled by filmmaker Craig Johnson (Wilson, The Skeleton Twins). Energetic and idiosyncratic, Alex Strangelove ends up being both a smile-inducing charmer and a sly contemporary take on the John Hughes teen masterpieces of the 1980s, especially in its command of teen dialect and the social structures of high school life.
Writer/director Craig Johnson studied theater at the University of Washington and worked in sketch comedy and theater before turning his attention to making movies. He studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and made his feature debut with his thesis project, True Adolescents (2009). His second film, The Skeleton Twins (Festival 2014), won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Film Details
Language English
Year 2018
Premiere World
Runtime 99
Country USA
Director Craig Johnson
Producer Jared Goldman, Ben Stiller, Nicholas Weinstock
Writer Craig Johnson
Editor Jennifer Lee
Cinematographer Hillary Spera
Music Nathan Larson
Cast Antonio Marziale, Joanna Adler, Isabella Amara