The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine, 2019) (Patreon)

More Harmony, less melody.

The Beach Bum is, in its own comically irritating way, a complete success when Korine and Matthew McConaghey work together to create an all-enveloping atmosphere of Florida burnout culture. It's not just the authenticity, although that helps -- the skin is appropriately ruddy and sun-crusted, the frozen drinks are in suitably ridiculous glasses, and Korine includes not just Jimmy Buffett (a gimme) but Bertie Higgins, for deep-cut Parrothead ambiance. Like a piece of work such as Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, or Korine's own Trash Humpers, the first 40% of The Beach Bum is wholly adept at making the frame a container for a complete universe with its own rules and values. 

Things start to go awry once Korine starts inserting "plot." This isn't just because the one he applies for this purpose is patently stupid -- a kind of riches-to-rags-to-"riches" scheme, a writer's block variant of Brewster's Millions, essentially. Conventional movie elements like character development and incident are fundamentally at odds with the sort of environmental filmmaking Korine has established from the outset, and shoehorning these elements in as an afterthought seems either cynical or trollish. So the episodic event structure that gives us (for example) Captain Wack (Martin Lawrence), or the rehab escape with Flicker (Zac Efron), feels willfully half-assed, as if Korine doesn't care about the multiplex audiences who hated Spring Breakers *or* his artsy-fartsy fanbase.

In a film where the three principals -- McConaghey, Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg -- are basically playing variations on their established personas, a wacky thespian attempt like Jonah Hill's lispy literary agent seems like too much effort and a fundamental misreading of the room. (Or, worse, an attempt to recapture James Franco's breakout weirdness from Breakers.) But Moondog (McConaghey) is, I suppose, an interesting idea for a character, a sort of Carl Hiaasen / Charles Bukowski hybrid whose jejune poetry somehow, paradoxically, taps into the banality and despair of American loserdom. In fact, maybe Moondog is Harmony's self-portrait.