The hokeyness compounds fast in Brian Petsos’s feature-length debut. Sam (Emory Cohen), failed and flailing hard-luck heir to a frozen custard empire, goes headfirst into a Cadillac windshield late one night, coming to his senses in a hospital bed across from Floyd (Andy Garcia), the car’s dapper, mysterious driver. Once Floyd hires Sam as his live-in biographer, the gags come quick, mainly centering around Sam’s loose grip on reality. But the movie seldom coalesces into more than a jumbled, mundane batch of fever dreams on Sam’s part. As the dreams are largely of the my-room-has-a-talking-Santa-doll-in-it variety—either that, or crude sexual fantasies involving Floyd’s wife Jacqueline (Megan Fox) and daughter Lily (Lucy Hale)—we end up wishing, if all we’re here to do is ride out Sam’s hallucinations, that a better dreamer held the reins.
Sam narrates his stint at Floyd’s mansion in retrospect as the now-successful author of Floyd’s biography. Trouble is, the parade of talk shows, recording sessions, and book signings that intersperse Sam’s delirium don’t feel much more grounded in reality than the events they describe. The effect is full disorientation, which feels refreshingly campy now and then, but bewilderingly out of touch the rest of the time.
Cohen’s performance leans too hard on a flimsy caricature of sputtering delirium, but Garcia redeems many of their scenes together with his easy joviality. Oscar Isaac clocks a brief appearance as Floyd’s maniacal betting rival Anselm Vogelweide, channeling and dialing up the moneyed shut-in he once played in a Petsos short film, Ticky Tacky (2014). 132 min.
Wide release in theaters February 25