- Starring
- Tyler Bocock, Hersh Powers, Marya Sea Kaminski
- Writer
- Wes Hurley
- Director
- Wes Hurley
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 95 minutes
- Release Date
- n/a
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s SXSW Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
Films like Potato Dreams of America don’t come along very often which is frankly a shame. This bonkers film and its subject matter will certainly not be or everyone but behind all the wackiness, the sheer originality and vision on display should be commended, not to mention that it’s also a blast to watch and hilarious. Suffice it to say that this will be unlike anything anyone has ever seen. This semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age, satire works for the most part underneath all that wackiness despite a tonal shift that essentially creates two different films with the latter half unable to carry the momentum of the first half. That being said, that latter half is still compelling in its own right though abrupt. The film tells the story of a gay boy named Potato (Bocock, Powers) and his single mother Lena (Sera Barbieri, Kaminski) who after living a tough life near the collapse of the Soviet Union, move to America once his mother becomes a mail-order bride for a man named John (Dan Lauria).
At its best, Potato Dreams of America was a coming-of-age story on multiple fronts as Potato had to navigate through two vastly different cultures in the Soviet Union and the United States. The contrast between the two could not be more clear as the film was just as much a satire and time capsule as much as it was a coming of age story as he and his family were constantly challenged by the circumstances of the time and their current environment as he figured out who he was and then how to be who he was. For a land that may have seemed so foreign to them, maybe it wasn’t as foreign as they thought. While a great script played a big part in making it all work, the best part of the film was its performances, especially Powers and Bocock as the younger and older Potato respectively.
In the end, for those looking for something a little different, Potato Dreams of America may indeed be for them.
still courtesy of SXSW
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.