Buoyed by alchemical good fortune and perfect timing, The New Romantic is the kind of movie, opening today (October 19), that comes along only occasionally. Consider it the millennial feminist granddaughter of Carnal Knowledge; a film that hits the zeitgeist square on the nose with its tale of a journalism student, Blake, whose sex column for the school paper suggests a talent for neither of those things. (Journalism or sex.)

The New Romantic takes a precision comic scalpel to Blake’s subsequent decision to find a sugar daddy, who she’s more than happy to exploit as fodder for her stab at tits-out gonzo reportage, along with the fringe benefits of getting laid and walking away with the odd diamond bracelet. As played by The End of the F***ing World's Jessica Barden, there’s some hefty star-power to Carly Stone’s feature writing-directing debut.

But it’s the supporting cast who seal The New Romantic’s wall-to-wall charm—chief among them Riverdale’s Hayley Law, who nails a certain kind of modern weaponized cynicism as Blake's roommate Nikki. She’s devastatingly (and hilariously) blunt with the seemingly less wise Blake. Law embodies Nikki so perfectly that we wonder if she’s even acting at all.

“I feel like the character is more how I would like to be,” says the actor, speaking to the Straight just a few hours prior to the film’s debut at the Vancouver International Film Festival. “But,” she adds, “Nikki’s also still really caring. She’s not just like the jealous bitch who’s calling Blake out all the time. I have a friend that’s like that to me, and I’m that person to her.”

Joining the conversation, Stone gushes over a cast that uniformly manages to capture the quantum subtleties of attitude written into the script, including Brett Dier as a wry student colleague. The filmmaker readily admits that she didn’t know what to expect from her first real encounter with the actor-species.

“I couldn’t have anticipated any of this, because I’m a writer first. Which means: sit behind a computer and don’t talk to anyone,” says the Toronto-native. “I was really lucky with the supporting cast. Everything I gave them, they’d bring something extra.”

It aided everyone, no doubt, that Stone's writing happened to be as sharp as it is.

Like any good comedy, The New Romantic treads some dicey moral/ethical ground, starting with its ambivalent take on the entire sugar baby phenomenon (symbolized at its most extreme by Law’s Riverdale castmate Camila Mendes in a brief but bracing role.) It’s therefore free to riff on timely third-rail items like the leaking of J.Law’s nude pics, aka 2014’s ‘The Fappening’, which comes up in one of the film’s more memorable, if casual exchanges.

Is that kind of thing fair game?

“‘Fair game’ makes it sound like we’re not allowed to talk about it, because it wasn’t cool that it happened,” reasons Law. “But it happened. Whether it was J.Law or Hayley Law—I think it was relevant.”

Adds Stone: “It was a conversation at the time when I wrote the script—whether you looked at the pictures or not—and I found that very funny. I didn’t really analyze if it was fair game or not, I just tried to be honest about the situation, and, ‘Where is the moral line?’ People did look at them, so I definitely felt okay commenting on that fact.”

Indeed, what finally emerges from The New Romantic is its creator’s thoughtful perspective on a cultural shift in sex/gender politics that’s still seismically underway, and which deserves a comedy as spiky and honest as this one. Interestingly enough, at 29 Stone is only four years older than Law, who insists that her director is “way more millennial than me.” 

Stone doesn’t agree. 

“I think your 20s are long,” she muses. “The beginning of my 20s were very different from the end of my 20s. I do feel like the past four or five years have removed me from that culture, allowing me to take a more observational position. We didn’t have Tinder when I was in university so immediately how you hook up and date is different. Well—I’m not sure about that. How you hook up is probably the same.”

“Right,” responds Law with a snort. “Coz there were no penises back then.”

Published October, 2018