The Beach Bum (2019)
Directed by Harmony Korine
An irreverent comedy about the misadventures of Moondog, a rebellious stoner and lovable rogue who lives large.
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3 films that influenced The Beach Bum
What critics say influenced The Beach Bum
Next to Matthew McConaughey's Moondog, Jeff Bridges' the Dude in The Big Lebowski could pass for an insurance adjuster.
I get that the guy is supposed to just “abide” like Jeff Bridges’ Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” but such a reading willfully overlooks all the pissy little petulant grace notes with which Bridges shaded his now-iconic character.
The proud cinematic subgenre known as the “stoner comedy” gets a flashy new entry with The Beach Bum , in which Matthew McConaughey plays a washed-up Florida poet who’s like an amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson, The Dude from The Big Lebowski , Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High , McConaughey’s own Wooderson from Dazed and Confused and McConaughey himself (or at least the version of him that lived in a Malibu trailer and was once arrested while playing bongos naked).
Like Jeff Bridges’s legendary The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” Moondog is a shaggy rebel who hates conformity because he despises the idea of a routine or any semblance of discipline.
Whereas movies like Inherent Vice or The Big Lebowski depicted characters with some opposition despite their naturally copacetic (if sometimes paranoid) demeanors by placing them in situations that didn't always welcome or flatter them, The Beach Bum takes none of Moondog's obstacles seriously — in fact, they never even read as obstacles.
If so, however, he also has a bit of the Dude from “The Big Lebowski” in his pop-cultural DNA, plus a few lashings of Alien, the millennial-thug-life Gatsby so memorably played by James Franco in “Spring Breakers.”
As if predicting the inevitable extreme of dysfunctional creative energies breastfed in the world of elitist one-percenters, Korine’s latest is at least thematically familiar to his past filmography, like the Pleasantville (1998) version of his 2009 Trash Humpers .
If you want a story about a drug-addled literary genius embarking on misadventures, Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is more effective.