Chris Coats | Stay Lost / 2023

the twilight zone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Coats (screenwriter and director) Stay Lost / 2023 [12 minutes]

 

There is something about Chris Coats Stay Lost that simply rubbed me in the wrong way. The story of a young boy (Keiynan Lonsdale) just getting off work at a small-town drive-up grocery who gets a call from his father insisting that he must also take over his shift at the store, suddenly falls into the twilight zone as a 1960s curly-haired hippie (Lukas Gage, a little too old to be playing this role) is seen playing his guitar under a nearby tree. Within minutes the hippie has seduced the hard-working boy—suggesting that the boy’s father has drug problems despite the fact that we have utterly no evidence for this—into running off into an endless road trip just to get away from the difficulties of his ordinary life.

     A few minutes later, the boy has come back, having stolen his father’s truck, to pick up his new friend as they speed off to a hippie commune where the musician is evidently the most beloved of this community of endless “love and peace” living in a shanty-town world more colorful, of course, but less organized than the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. Inevitably, the truck breaks down, making a return home impossible for the boy and giving the musician an opportunity to continue his seduction of the young man.

      They begin kissing in a manner of a Hallmark card if that company had ever imagined depicting the love-children of the 1960s babbling out words suggesting their love was fate. A few minutes later they’re back on the road for a thousand and one nights of grungy sleepovers wherever they can find a spot to drop. How the couple will eat, dress, and clean themselves seems beside the point of this idyll whose goal appears to be broadcast in the film’s title.

      I too loved the musical Hair and all it stood for, but even though I lived through that period as a young boy of the perfect age to become a hippie, the idea of going for weeks without a bath and a good bed and being surrounded by all that raucous noise, uninvited company, and psychedelic color—which soon after found a perfect fit in movie musicals and ad campaigns—never attracted me in the least; nor did the dirty-haired boy fresh out of that past in Coats’ film.

      Although the hard working-boy clearly needed a break, and it was he who picked up the hippie in his dad’s truck, we might make a case that he had been seduced by an older man and kidnapped, never to be heard from again.

      The invocation to “stay lost,” almost send chills up my spine. We truly hope this young boy will eventually find someone who isn’t as lost as his hippie friend.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).