Never Goin' Back (Film Review)

2018 A24
Written and Directed by: Augustine Frizzell
Starring: Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 85 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 9/10

Spending your teenage years paying your own bills and working for a living is...not ideal. My dad declared bankruptcy my senior year of high school (thanks, NAFTA!), and while he certainly turned that around, I spent a large part of my senior year working my butt off at Winn Dixie and Walmart, paying my car insurance, and generally giving my parents the rest of my paycheck. Thankfully, though, my parents were still around, I had a place to live, food on the table, and every five or six paychecks, enough money left over to buy a Nintendo 64 game. The teenaged girl duo in Augustine Frizzell's Never Goin' Back aren't so lucky.
Angela crashes with Jesse in a rented house, paid for by their diner job paychecks, and shared by two male roommates, one a dorky sandwich shop employee, the other Jesse's screwup brother, with no parents in sight. Residents of a sweltering, strip-mall-laden South Texas wasteland, Angela and Jesse have dropped out of high school, struggle to hold their jobs, have their water turned off, and their television stolen. Never Goin' Back is a comedy.
Angela and Jesse are two fun-loving goofs, with few prospects, and zero positive role models, outside of their empathetic, but exhausted boss. The duo are awful employees, often showing up for work in some form of inebriation, and often having to come up with elaborate excuses for their frequent absences. Their boss excuses their behavior because of the girls' sweet natures, and has even agreed to give them extra shifts, to pay for a surprise trip to Galveston Angela's purchased for the two, so they can live their dream of eating donuts on the beach and swimming with "dolphies."
As the hilarious Angela and Jessie, Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone respectively imbue this dim-witted duo with a manic energy that feels as natural as their friendship is co-dependent. They're never more than five feet from each other for the entirety of the film, and there's never a hint of conflict between the hyperactive, foul-mouthed duo. You'd never suspect the actresses are an Australian former child star and an Argentinian supermodel, as Mitchell and Morrone fully embody these two goofy, hard luck characters. Sure enough, befitting the bad fortune the two have faced their entire life, their plans to save money during the week are repeatedly thwarted by increasingly extreme circumstances. Frizzell's script and direction pulls off the ace maneuver of laughing with the duo about their circumstances, and not at them, as it is quite clear, even when the two make a boneheaded life decision, that their circumstances haven't put them in much of a place to choose differently.
Even as the duo's potty mouths and the film's potty humor flows, Never Goin' Back carries an underlying empathy for these goofballs that never wavers. The two friends are so fun to be around, and the movie enjoys being in their presence so much, their optimism and good vibes are contagious, even when they're out of toilet paper, food, and can't wash their clothes. It's clear Frizzell's channeling a 90's indie-slacker vibe here, but those films, even in Kevin Smith's more successful works, never showed more care for their characters. Even Jesse's idiot brother, whose incompetent attempts at being a low-level criminal hurt the girl's chances at hitting the beach more than anything, is tough to hate.
It might involve explosive diarrhea, projectile vomiting, and unspeakable acts committed to a hot dog, but Never Goin' Back is a rare type of film: the kind that teaches the viewer to be less quick to judge.