Director: Todd Berger
Screenplay: Todd Berger
Producers: Kevin Brennan, Jeff Grace, Brett D. Thompson
Starring: Sherilyn Fenn, Todd Berger, Blaise Miller, Suzanne May, Jeff Grace, Monika Jolly, Kevin Brennan
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 101min.

(3.5/5)

There’s something innately enjoyable about seeing locations you know, places you frequent, and types of people you see every day on screen; that might make me a somewhat biased reviewer of The Scenesters, an indie mystery-comedy that takes place on the East Side of LA among the hipster population of Silverlake and Echo Park – a neighborhood I happen to spend a good bit of time in personally. And I will admit that I got huge kicks of pleasure out of recognizing shooting locations like comic book stores and bars, and references to bands I know and stuff like that.

The story itself follows filmmaker Wallace Cotten (writer/director Todd Berger), who takes a job as a crime scene videographer to make ends meet. But he (and his producer Roger, played by Jeff Grace) can’t resist trying to find a film in all this rather than just taking standard crime scene footage. They quickly latch on to crime scene cleaner Charlie (Blaise Miller), whose intuitions suggest a recent crime spree is actually the work of a serial killer, and start making a documentary about Charlie’s amateur investigation of the crimes, while having interns film them creating the documentary as behind-the-scenes footage. Meanwhile, the killer also starts making videos, which are incorporated into Cotten’s documentary footage, and a local TV reporter starts making her name by reporting on the case. All this video from various sources then becomes evidence in the trial that frames the film (itself presented as a TrialTV show) – there are at least three or four levels of meta here, and the device of everything being footage from an explicit in-film source is rather nicely carried out.

The film has some really strong ideas, especially as producer Roger starts manipulating Charlie’s life more and more to make it a more interesting subject for a film – like conspiring to rekindle Charlie’s romance with the reporter Jewell Wright (Suzanne May). There’s also some intriguing stylistic stuff, as Cotten shoots the documentary with an artificial but beautiful B&W film noir style, including the fatalistic voiceover and comments on the depravity of human nature and the seediness of the city – far different from anything we actually see in the realistic portions of the film, which have an appropriately amateurish quality (since it’s supposed to be largely shot by untrained interns). It’s a fun and witty homage/parody of film noir conventions as well as of Silverlake culture in general, which gets not-so-subtley raked over the coals here. The dialogue is quite funny, too, with a lot of throwaway lines worth a laugh.

Ostensibly, the overall film we see is the lawyer (Sherilyn Fenn, of Twin Peaks) interrogating the various characters about the footage, so it cuts back and forth a lot from showing the footage to her asking them about things in it or their part in the story. But the whole courtroom section is a bit flat, and except for a few good lines of dialogue in there it probably would’ve been better to just show the footage as is without the frame. Which is a shame, because I was really looking forward to seeing Sherilyn Fenn again, and I was disappointed that her section didn’t hold up as much as I wanted it to. You could argue that it’s intentionally not compelling in order to emulate the style of TV court shows, but that doesn’t really change the fact that it’s not compelling.

The rest of the film is a little patchy, and it goes for some obvious jokes, but there were interesting things to think about and as someone who enjoys meta filmmaking, movies about movies, evocations of film noir, and overly ironic dialogue, I was definitely entertained – the Silverlake setting was icing on the cake. The portrayal of Los Angeles on screen is often intriguing (as the documentary LA Plays Itself attests), and it’s nice to see the modern East Side featured so prominently.

The Scenesters opens today for a week-long engagement at LA’s Downtown Independent Theatre. The Downtown Independent has a roof-top bar and every night this week, there will be live bands from The Scenesters soundtrack playing up there after the film screens, so if you’re in LA, this is probably the best way you’ll ever have to experience this film.