A slamming indictment of ding-a-ling millennials, an Office Space–like screed against corporate monotony, a riotous inertia comedy: Joel Potrykus’s so-indie-it-burns latest could be all of those things, though there isn’t any pressing reason to choose. Built around a transfixingly dead-eyed performance by Joshua Burge, Buzzard makes a mockery of our need to engage with heroes, even massively flawed ones. Marty (Burge) spends his time crafting a dangerous-looking replica of Freddy Krueger’s razor glove. That’s when he’s not playing video games, ineptly scamming his workplace out of printer toner, or flinging tennis balls at his one and only dork of a friend, whose basement he’s become a stinky fixture in.
Go with it, like you might have gone with Gummo. (The state of Michigan is done no favors by these banal urban streets.) Potrykus has something uncommonly pure in mind, filling his plot with a stream of Marty’s poorly conceived rackets, occasional bursts of violence and a kind of nihilistic self-ruination that rings as loudly as a punk song. Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.
Follow Joshua Rothkopf on Twitter: @joshrothkopf