Nights and Weekends

To some extent, if you've seen one Swanberg film, you've seen them all; Nights And Weekends contains the usual mix of frank, awkward sex scenes and couples talking passive-aggressively around each other.

This movie belongs to its stars, who also wrote and produced. You can't say their acting is good or bad because they are not really acting. They're just being themselves, pubic hair and all.

Nights and Weekends knocked me out when I saw it last March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas; I wrote at the time that it offered exactly the "prickly, flawed, urgent SXSW experience I'd been waiting for."

Some may find the result boring or unpolished, but there's poetry -- not to mention a fair dose of comedy -- in the mix.

The problem with the movie is that James and Mattie exhibit little but shallow, infantile neurosis, with next to no hint of a complex -- or even legible -- inner life.

Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.