"The Sweet East" harkens back to an earlier era of indie filmmaking — maybe as far back as the 1969 "Easy Rider." Once again, we're wandering around the squalid modern world and seeing it through outsider eyes. The story begins in Washington, D.C., where a bus full of New Jersey high school kids is visiting the nation's capital, presumably for the purpose of being bored stiff. One of them, a devious girl named Lillian (Talia Ryder), splits off on her own and embarks on a series of eccentric adventures of the sort that are — or once were — requisite in a movie like this. First she encounters a group of dope-smoking neo-hippies, partakes of their Dumpster-sourced dinner, and watches as one of them shows her his heavily pierced penis. She'd rather eat nails.
Lillian moves on to other scenes in other places, all of them along the Eastern Seaboard. She starts out at an oddly subdued Aryan Brotherhood rally, where, among the jostling free-range racists, she encounters a college poetry professor (!) named Lawrence (Simon Rex), who tells her, unnecessarily, that "one doesn't always find a better class of white men at these events." Lillian doesn't ask Lawrence what he's doing there, in that case, but instead inaugurates their relationship with a lie, telling him that her name is Annabel. This is a sort of thing she does on the regular, along with appropriating other people's life stories and presenting them as her own.
Lillian — or Annabel — clearly isn't girlfriend material. But Lawrence — who's much older than she is and exhibits no carnal interest in her — keeps her around anyway. Possibly he just needs an audience for his endless store of academic blather. ("Do you know that Philadelphia was the second city of the British empire when Manchester and Glasgow were nothing?")
Lawrence makes no sense as a character, and you wonder if screenwriter Nick Pinkerton even intended him to. (The movie's mood sometimes suggests a private joke.) In any case, Rex and Ryder put some energy into their scenes, which director Sean Price Williams shoots with maximum indie verve. So the movie slumps a little when Annabel moves along again and is taken up by a pair of Black filmmakers, Molly and Matthew (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris). They recruit her for the picture they're making, despite her lack of acting experience. ("The best actress," Molly observes, "is just a woman who says yes.") Waiting in the wings is their movie's devilishly handsome star, a Brit (well, Australian) named Ian (Jacob Elordi), and a group of wandering monks, among them one portrayed by Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes.
"The Sweet East" has a vintage scruffy look, and it's fun to watch for a while. But it's really too scattershot to justify its length — and it's not even all that long.
'FITTING IN'
Lindy McPhee is a girl with a problem — a terrible one, as it turns out. Lindy is 16 years old and still hasn't gotten her period. She's becoming seriously worried, as is her sympathetic mother. So as the Canadian movie "Fitting In" opens, we find mom and daughter in an OB-GYN clinic, listening to a doctor uncomfortably explaining things with the help of a little plastic demonstration doll. Lindy, he says, is suffering from a condition called MRKH syndrome, which means she was born without a uterus or a cervix, or much of a vagina, either. ("It leads to nowhere," the doctor bluntly tells her. "A dead end.")
Writer-director Molly McGlynn uses Lindy's situation — facing a future without sex or children — as a means of examining the status of the female body in a male-dominated society. The movie delivers no angry messages; it just notes things like the preponderance of male physicians treating medical conditions that are exclusive to women. (Lindy's mom, Rita, a psychotherapist, is dealing with the mental aftereffects of breast-reconstruction surgery.)
McGlynn's story is sweet and un-nudgingly humane, and the director is skillfully assisted in telling it by a sterling cast — especially Emily Hampshire ("Schitt's Creek") as Rita, Djouliet Amara as Lindy's spunky pal Vivian, Ki Griffin as an upbeat intersex kid, and especially the goddessy Maddie Ziegler, who's been performing (dancing, acting, modeling) since she was in single digits, and who captures the quietly conflicted Lindy with low-key expertise. She has a way with a zippy line, too: When some guy sends Lindy a dick pic, and she's unsure how to respond, she says, "Do I send him a thumbs-up emoji?"
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