A disaffected South Carolina schoolgirl heading to Washington DC meets white supremacists, feckless creatives and more in Sean Price Williams’s anarchic state-of-the-nation satire
The Sweet East is certainly polarising. Watching the directorial debut of cinematographer and Safdie brothers collaborator Sean Price Williams is a little like getting stuck in a train carriage with a teenager blasting music through the tinny speaker of their mobile phone. On the one hand it’s enraging and you would do pretty much anything to make it stop. And yet there’s a grudging admiration for the insouciant swagger, for the no fucks given attitude and the glassy layer of self-absorption. It takes a certain elan to be this unapologetically obnoxious, so kudos for that, I guess.
A digressive, episodic journey of self-discovery, the film follows Lillian (star-in-the-making Talia Ryder), a high school student from South Carolina who gets separated from her classmates during a trip to Washington DC. Lillian swaps names and identities the way other people change nail polish colours; she latches on to a group of activists, including the smoky-eyed, extravagantly pierced Caleb (Earl Cave); then middle-aged white supremacist Lawrence (Simon Rex), then Molly (Ayo Edebiri), an excruciatingly pretentious film-maker who casts Lillian opposite heartthrob Ian (Jacob Elordi) in her indie film production.
