The Bay Area was a weird place in 1987. You had the remnants of the Me Decade’s cults of touchy-feeliness bumping up against Silicon Valley’s computer-nerd capitalism. Competing D.I.Y. music scenes meant you could surf between S.F. Thrash, East Bay rap, and pockets of punk popping up from everywhere; shows and entrances to a subculture of your choice were just a BART ride away. Other than the San Francisco 49ers, still deep into their Joe Montana-led winning streak, sports meant rooting for underdogs. (The Oakland A’s “Bash Brothers” heyday was a few years away.) Hippies, bikers, burnouts, and basket cases still roamed the land. If you were a kid growing up in Berkeley like Ryan Fleck was, the whole thing would have seemed exciting and dangerous and overwhelming. Of course you’d want to make a movie about it.
Premiering on Sundance’s opening night and named after the classic Too Short song, Freaky Tales rewinds to that oddball annus mirabilis and presents a quartet of stories set in and among the Bay’s melting-pot of misfits. Co-written and co-directed with his longtime collaborator Anna Boden, Fleck’s return to the daze of his youth plays like a memory movie spiked with Upper Haight Street mescaline. For those who share his Northern California roots and lived through those times, the anthology has the feel of an oral history about urban myths: You remember the night the Gilman Street punx beat down the Nazi skinz? Did you hear about the rap battle where a teenage female duo fought Short to a draw? Were you there at the Oakland Coliseum when Eric “Sleepy” Floyd broke the fourth quarter scoring record in Game 4 of the Western Conference Playoffs and helped the Golden State Warriors trounce the L.A. Lakers? For everyone else, this will play more like an Eighties video store fever dream, filtered through the template of an extremely notable Nineties cinematic milestone. The “Freaky” descriptive is well-earned, even if this all seems mighty familiar.
Chapter One, titled “The Gilman Strikes Back,” drops viewers into the middle of a teenage riot happening at the legendary 924 Gilman St. club, in which the diverse crowd of punk rockers find themselves under siege by a gang of racist skinheads. The righteous, nonviolent collective debate whether they turn the other pierced cheek when it comes to these hate-mongering brutes or defend their turf by any means necessary; the vote eventually favors taking up arms. (“So I’m gonna be the guy who doesn’t want to fight the Nazis?!” says the lone hold-out, Gilman cofounder Tim Yohannan. “Fuck that.” R.I.P. Tim Yo.) The melee that follows is one part giddy Scott Pilgrim interlude, one part old-school Batman fight scene. It ends with a kiss on the dancefloor, a swooning mix of cartoonish violence, romanticized nostalgia, and a sugar rush. A tone’s been set!
From there, we hit up Downtown Oakland, where the up-and-coming rap duo Barbie (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever‘s Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Fifth Harmony alum Normani) get smooth-talked into getting onstage with Too Short (current Bay Area rapper Symba, nailing his hero’s oft-kilter cadence) at his next show. The caveat is that these two have to freestyle battle him, thus risking ending their career before it’s really begun. After that, we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal), who’s about to retire from breaking fingers for loan sharks and go off into the sunset with his pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez). His past, however, catches up with him.
Finally, there’s that big Golden State Warriors win courtesy of Sleepy (Jay Ellis), who returns home to a tragedy of his own. It seems that a crew of thieves — one of whom is played by Angus Cloud, lending pathos to every one of the character’s dim recitations of sports trivia — have coordinated break-ins for all of the players’ houses during the game. The plan goes awry when Sleepy’s mother and girlfriend unexpectedly return home mid-robbery. Luckily, he has some off-court talents of his own, which come in handy when it’s time for payback….
Cameos from a lot of Bay Area O.G.s are abound, from the real Too Short to Operation Ivy/Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong to someone we’ll only identify as “Concord’s favorite son.”
There’s a lot of connective tissue between these stories, ranging from a fateful Lost Boys screening to characters passing by each other at a diner [cough, cough]. Green lighting bolts and ads for Sleepy’s “Pystopics” seminars keep weaving their way in and out of stories, resulting in a major fourth-act payoff. Folks like a scumbag cop (Ben Mendelsohn) show up in various vignettes and help establish a timeline for the numerous events. Cameos from a lot of Bay Area O.G.s are abound, from the real Too Short to Operation Ivy/Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong to someone we’ll only identify as “Concord’s favorite son.” You will lose count of the number of Reagan-era cult movies and video-rental staples that Fleck and Boden reference, though a partial list would include Repo Man, Scanners, The Fury, The Warriors, Dirty Harry, Beat Street, and The Last Dragon. Even the opening narration scroll feels like it’s being beamed in from Planet VHS Grindhouse.
Full disclosure: I grew up in San Jose, California, during the exact same time period Fleck is lovingly paying tribute to, and personally recognize many of the clubs, city streets, burger joints, ice cream parlors, and after-hours haunts that Freaky Tales either recreates or genuflects before here. And like a lot of people, I’ve also seen Pulp Fiction, a film that post-dates the era but casts a massive shadow over Fleck’s scrapbook with a pulse. Comparisons are as inevitable as they are unfair, and while this collection of Bay Area deep cuts will serve as a Proustian madeleine smothered in Karo syrup for those who were there back in the day, most folks may find that it’s pinging their memory banks in a less flattering manner. The first-person passion is genuine. The form its being presented in feels slightly secondhand.
Fleck and Boden are Sundance veterans who made their name via character studies that skirted cliché largely by their curiosity about other cultural experiences and a sheer abundance of humanity. Watch Half Nelson (2005) and their baseball drama Sugar (2008), and you feel like you’re hearing well-worn narratives told for the first time; Mississippi Grind (2015) is easily the best lousy-losers road movie not made in the 1970s. The idea that they’d do a Marvel movie seemed logical to some and mystifying to others, and their deft touch helped distinguish Captain Marvel (2019) from being just another MCU assembly-line product.
An ode to the splatterfests, gory revenge flicks, and psychotronic goodies of yesteryear’s moviegoing diets, all of which is laid over a subjective trip back to a specific time and a specific region, was not on a lot of people’s bingo cards regarding their next project. Which, in a lot of ways, makes Freaky Tales a victory lap for Fleck and Boden; if you can’t beat them, join ’em… and if you don’t want to join them, then seriously confuse ’em. They certainly seemed overjoyed to bring this throwback to Sundance, with Fleck namechecking a host of Bay Area bigwigs and stomping grounds while bringing dozens of cast and crew on the stage at the Eccles Theater. Everyone ate it up. How this will play outside of a festival-friendly crowd is anyone ‘s guess, but I guarantee this: It will absolutely kill at the Grand Lake Theater on a Friday night after some Giant Burgers and a sugar cone at Loard’s on MacArthur Boulevard.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
