From YouTube to reality TV to empty theaters case file #74: Not Cool

I consequently expected so little from Not Cool that, honestly, I was borderline blown away that the film was even in focus. I was dreading a movie that would be an atrocity on the order of Movie 43. This is, after all, a movie so dire-looking that the filmmakers had a hard time even getting a prostitute to work on it anonymously. Zachary Quinto, a producer on the show who insisted that his name be taken off of Not Cool, angrily condemned this movie on moral, creative, and aesthetic grounds. Quinto, and many critics, saw Not Cool as a film that was not just bad, but hateful.

At the risk of giving this sad little orphan the faintest of faint praise, Not Cool isn’t nearly as awful as I had anticipated. There is a blandly competent, even mediocre coming-of-age teen comedy buried somewhere deep within Not Cool, but you’d have to wade through a sewer of gags about bodily fluids, racist jokes, and embarrassingly broad mugging to get to it. Unless you’re riveted by The Chair or a Dawson superfan, it’s not worth the effort.

Dawson is miscast as protagonist Scott, a photographer who was the super-cool prom king in high school, yet returns to his hometown on break from college lost and adrift. He is particularly bummed after being dumped by his girlfriend, Beth. In the original script, Beth was a relatively grounded character, but Dawson transformed her into an oversexed, crazy-eyed she-devil who breaks up with Scott through a glory hole in a men’s bathroom.

Before we can even get to the glory hole, we’re introduced to Scott’s world through an opening party sequence that conveys the film’s tone all too effectively. In rapid succession, the film lovingly races through gags rooted in fat-shaming; slut-shaming (sometimes at the same time, like when an overweight, drunken, and soon-to-vomit woman tweets about needing to get STUFFED that Thanksgiving); homophobia; casual racism; and the most sympathetic, multidimensional character (sassy female lead Tori) being vomited upon just before the credits hit. If Dawson was deliberately trying to offend and alienate anyone who isn’t already a fan, he succeeds wildly. He’s intent on realizing his scatological vision at all costs, but in the first few minutes alone, Dawson gives critics and a public that already has ample reason to be skeptical of him all the justification they need to write him off.

Dawson has been called out repeatedly for racist stereotypes, yet that somehow hasn’t kept him from thinking that a joke involving an overweight, black homeless man eating his own feces is so explosively funny and so crucial that he’s willing to seemingly fight to the death over it. The poop-eating joke figures hugely in The Chair; in Not Cool, it barely registers. Dawson seems to think it’s his American Pie pie-fucking bit or the ejaculate hairspray gag in There’s Something About Mary. Instead, it’s a hateful, racist lowbrow joke in a film overflowing with them.

Yet, the elements Dawson is least confident about come across the strongest. Dawson is definitely miscast; nothing about him screams “popular high school student,” but the insecurity and self-doubt Dawson brings to the role work in this context. Cherami Leigh is even better as love interest Tori. Leigh isn’t playing a human being so much as she’s playing an immediately recognizable type: a Juno/Daria-style smartass whose sardonic wisecracks and sarcastic one-liners mask underlying vulnerability. There’s nothing remotely original about the character, but Leigh is sassy and appealing, and newcomer Drew Monson, another YouTube veteran, channels a young Crispin Glover as Joel, a gangly eccentric with a crush on Scott’s sister.

Producer Chris Moore, who nailed the raunchy/emotional tone more successfully with American Pie, surrounds Dawson with polished pros who help the film look and feel slicker and more professional than The Chair would suggest. Yet Dawson can’t stop sabotaging himself. The “wacky” characters here yell their lines at deafening volumes, lurch about in ways seemingly designed to replicate the jump-cut-riddled, short-attention-span aesthetic of YouTube comedy videos, and stop just short of frothing at the mouth and wearing straitjackets to convey how crazy they are.

Dawson plays a few of these grotesques himself, most notably a horny old Jewish woman driver and a dizzy, oversexed party girl. Removing these characters would be an easy way to make the film better, but Dawson doesn’t trust himself as an actor to be funny without the huge physical comedy and bigotry-based humor that made him rich and famous. So he’s made a weird hybrid that’s 80 percent surprisingly professional-looking generic teen movie and 20 percent brazenly offensive, amateurish YouTube-style nonsense.

Dawson begins The Chair and the process of filming Not Cool clearly eager to impress the powerful, sophisticated, continental Zachary Quintos of the world and escape a world where he only matters to screaming tween girls. He ends the film taking comfort in the knowledge that, yes, Zachary Quinto despises his work with an extremely public intensity, but at least 12-year-old girls are still laughing at his poop jokes. This helps explain the film’s commercial failure: No one should see Not Cool, but especially no one under the age of 17. The vast majority of Dawson’s fans are likely much younger than that.

At that point, it’s hard not to feel for Dawson. He worked hard to make a movie that wasn’t just panned, it was eviscerated and made almost no money despite his incredible popularity. Yet, the movie won The Chair competition anyway, and with it the $250,000 prize. It seems very show-business that the bad guy ended up winning and true to independent film that the winner still ended up losing big time. And the documentary competition established him as a fascinating, complicated, extremely driven, and focused young man, but also a thin-skinned, sometimes cruel, narcissistic, and overconfident neophyte.

The Chair has a lot to teach hungry, aspiring filmmakers about the brutal realities of film and any collaborative medium where art and commerce clash. But no one can learn more from it than Dawson himself. He set out to be the YouTube world’s first big crossover success in the mainstream film world. Instead, his story, and particularly his film, stand as a harrowing cautionary tale. There is a riveting, funny, sad, and extremely compelling coming-of-age story in this saga, but it belongs not to Scott, but to a deeply unlikable yet fascinating character like Dawson.

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Fiasco