‘Junk’ MUBI Review: Two Worlds of Addiction Collide in an Ambitious but Forced Narrative Experiment

There are two kinds of pill addicts in the world. The ones who have their name on the bottle and the ones who don’t.” The line, spoken by Martin (David Schwimmer), a successful but frustrated screenwriter working on a hit sitcom and planning to direct his feature debut, sums up in more ways than one the themes and logic of Junk, Jack Begert’s first feature. The film’s two intertwined stories connect and put into tension two very different worlds: those of addicts who have the money and means to get whatever they want whenever they want it, and those who often end up committing crimes to obtain the same things.

Junk tells this story through two separate plots that barely intersect, but that brief intersection creates an unexpectedly large ripple effect. In that sense, the film—which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival under the title Little Death and is only now getting a worldwide release, apparently in a re-edited version—has something in common with movies that tell parallel stories set in Los Angeles, trying to communicate ideas about life in the city by bringing together very different worlds and characters. It’s a device used, with varying degrees of success, in films such as Magnolia, Short Cuts, Grand Canyon and, most notably, Crash: painting a sprawling city through a series of small stories scattered across its geography.

Here there are only two stories (or, thanks to a certain surprising narrative detour, perhaps three), but the connection between them is extremely tenuous, imposed more by the screenplay than by anything else. And the movie often feels forced by that thematic construction. Good characters and good scenes share screen time with others that feel arbitrary and heavy-handed, populated by characters who can be fairly insufferable. Where Begert ultimately wants to go may make sense, but getting there means traveling through dramatic territory that at times feels rather familiar.

It all begins when Martin announces to a group of friends that his feature directorial debut is finally coming together. His partner (Jena Malone) is considerably more skeptical about the financing and doubts whether the movie will actually get made, which annoys Martin. Just when it seems that we are going to follow the problems of this couple and their particular world, the film makes a radical turn and introduces us to a group of people who have just committed a robbery. There, the two drivers, Karla (Talia Ryder) and AJ (musician Dominic Fike), are forced out of their car by the robbers and lose the things they need most. She loses her car. He loses some paperwork for a business project he has to turn in the next morning.

The film now follows the pair, both addicts, as they try to recover their belongings and, in the process, connect with a strange assortment of characters from Los Angeles’ drug trade. Once we are well into their story, Junk suddenly returns to Martin, who discovers that his movie is nowhere near as locked in as he had assumed: the producer wants the lead to be a woman, he goes into crisis mode, takes more pills than he should, falls for a woman he happens to meet, and so on. The film then enters a strange loop in which some characters are replaced by others, several dreamlike sequences appear, and there is even some animation. And then, just as abruptly, we return to the story of the two addicts.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the connection between the two worlds becomes clear. It is minimal, accidental and somewhat haphazard, but it is the kind of encounter that changes everyone’s lives, including those of a curious Chihuahua who steals several scenes. The idea triggered by that connection is hardly new and plays with an irony similar to that of films like Pulp Fiction: what is a tragedy for one person can be a potential salvation for another. Ultimately, what separates these two worlds, more than the names on the pill bottles, is the way each group goes about solving its problems.

Junk is unquestionably original and creative, and it has several interesting—if not necessarily groundbreaking—observations about the worlds of film and television and the people who inhabit them. At the same time, though, it struggles with a series of problems that the film itself announces from the outset as difficult ones to solve: a group of protagonists who are not particularly likable (especially in the screenwriter’s storyline, but also in the other one) and a shift in perspective that doesn’t entirely work. It seems the critics of the protagonist’s screenplay may have had a point after all.

Schwimmer and the ensemble cast —in small but significant roles, the film features Gaby Hoffmann, Seth Green, Angela Sarafyan, Karla Glusman, Chase Sui Wonders, Ben Feldman, Fred Melamed and Maya Kazan, among others— do their best to bring life to the various conflicts presented here, but the film only comes alive intermittently, mostly in the story of the young addicts, which could easily have been the only one of the two. As it stands, Junk is a curious, uneven film, a narrative experiment that never quite manages to work.