States is a 2019 transient road film featuring an array of young drifters wandering throughout the U.S. with varying degrees of purpose, or lack-thereof.
My guess is about nine minutes. Possibly ten. Then the questions will come, most of those variations of, “What the hell am I watching?” and “How much more can I possibly take?” That’s mostly the point though, writer and director Zach Gayne‘s experimental travel-log ode to modern America a curious and fascinating crossbreed of good ol’ fashioned road trip movies with heaping buckets of WTF? It works hard to defy description, a seemingly ad-libbed collage of encounters that is as frustratingly undefined as it is deeply metaphorical. Truth is, I loathed it when it kicked off. I found myself struggling to keep with it, but was entirely transformed by its end, drawn into its widening circle of madness, which left me oddly displaced. I wondered if I was truly witnessing something avant-garde or duped into watching some guy’s nonsensical drivel. That’s a rare place to be.
Opening with a young disheveled man (Michael Wieck) passed out in an abandoned lot just south of the border, he wakes up and scrambles for clothes, then walks about looking for a ride back to Texas. We then cut to a woman hitchhiking to Roswell, believing she hears aliens in her head, finding help here and there from those who also believe. Then, elsewhere, a woman (Alex Essoe) gets in a Uber heading for Las Vegas, obsessed with her Instagram. Far from there, a man (Jeremy O. Harris) hopes poetry is in his future, getting a ride from two spiritual women on a quest of their own. And that’s not all. There are more, cutting along the Southwest and Los Angeles, slowly and inevitably finding ways to cross paths, many with absolutely no closure.
In some ways, States feels like a treatise on what it means to be a young person in the United States, with conversation after conversation about everything from the hollowness of chasing celebrity to the exploration of belief to the very meaning of life. It’s not as transparent as all that, Gayne meandering all over the place in spinning plots and jumping around in time, lingering for great length on extended interactions that do little to give much depth to these characters aside from leaping from one odd moment to the next. Yet of course, the takeaway is that none of them are odd. They are just real life.
At nearly two hours though, the journey is long, simply because there really is no cohesive story to get on board with, a herky-jerky handheld camera waltzing about ever-increasingly strange tributaries that give shape to a kind of splintered Homer-esque delirium. That’s most evident in the fate of the poet, but hints of more saturate all corners of this wildly experimental adventure, one that feels like a throwback to a drug-fueled late night 1960s drive-in. Gayne aggressively steers his project out of the mainstream, forcing his audience to make a choice, either jump in and swim around or hit the road and never look back.
If you do stick with it, there are rewards, most especially in a final moment that I won’t dare spoil, but is remarkably moving as a character (Ayaka Kinugawa) we had yet to meet leaps to center stage and sums up everything about the entire message of the movie (all to a 35-year-old Madonna song). It’s a perfect “this story never ends” sequence that is the best hint that Gayne’s knows precisely what he is doing and maybe, just maybe, this little movie is far more than it appears. It earns a whole extra star just for making me think so.