Mixing together the debauchery of Trainspotting with the youthful disaffection of Skins (the British version, of course), director Eoin Macken’s film Here Are the Young Men, based on the 2014 novel by Rob Doyle, is a cynical look at three frustrated young men during the summer after they graduate from school, circa 2003. Taking its title from the Joy Division song “Decades,” Macken’s film is, in many ways, a throwback to the type of hyperkinetic malcontent portraits of youth behaving badly that cropped up in the early 2000s––A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Thirteen, Havoc, etc.––grafted onto Dublin. Featuring a trio of up-and-coming actors––Dean-Charles Chapman, Finn Cole, and Ferdia Walsh-Peelo––in addition to an underutilized Anya Taylor-Joy, Here Are the Young Men attempts to mine the depths of toxic masculinity, played out differently by the three boys, but the film often regresses back to a portrait of bacchanalian depravity without a clear understanding of what exactly it’s trying to say.
Beginning with a funeral, as Chapman’s Matthew (the film’s de facto protagonist and sole stabilizing voice among the three) recounts the previous summer leading up to the obscured tragic events. The film then propulsively moves through the last moments of school, as the three, including Cole’s Kearney and Walsh-Peelo’s Rez, take pills in a church, only to break into their old school, graffiting and destroying the place in the process. Running from the cops, they end up at rave, continuing their drunken reveling, unwilling to accept the looming responsibilities of adulthood. Later, they witness a young girl get run over by a car, triggering differing reactions from the three, as they all refuse to process the tragic act with varying degrees of destructive behavior.
Rounding out the group is Taylor-Joy’s Jen, the type of movie cool-girl who can karaoke to Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” but also be the only mature voice of reason for the group. She and Matthew fall into a relationship mercifully quickly, yet as Matthew begins a cycle of partying, becoming increasingly dependent on drugs to cope with the lingering PTSD he feels after witnessing the car crash, his relationship with her spirals. Kearney, on the other hand, high tails it to America, becoming increasingly violent as the car crash unlocks his interest in exploring death, while Rez attempts suicide to escape his own lingering trauma.
Macken and Doyle, who also co-wrote the script, lay on the trauma and misogyny, cycling through performative acts of aggression, and the partying that they do to escape their everyday boredom. Stylistically, Macken shoots these drug-induced through a haze, blurring the frame as the characters, but mostly Matthew, attempt to push out the looming accountability that adulthood represents. Intermixing grainy DV footage, that Kearney habitually films, as well as an odd stylistic choice that literalizes Matthew’s interior struggles through an over-the-top game show featuring Travis Fimmel and Noomi Rapace in smaller roles, Here Are the Young Men hints at some commentary about the effects of mass media on youth, but never fully realizes this theme.
Taylor-Joy, whose outsized role in the marketing material in this 2018-shot film suggests a retrofitting post-Queen’s Gambit, brings nuance to what is an archetypal role. But Jen is relegated to the periphery, taking care of Matthew as he spirals, before a late-act event featuring Kearney (which you can probably see coming) reduces her previous autonomy, making the character little more than an inciting event for Matthew’s character growth. Here Are The Young Men slowly marginalizes every character that isn’t the titular three, more concerned with presenting their hedonistic lifestyle than developing any of the themes that hover around the margins of the film.
While Macken’s narrative may be underdeveloped, he nevertheless showcases a penchant for stylistic framing, deploying a number of formalist tricks––quick cutting, filters, blurring, disorienting sound––to bring the viewers into the subjective headspace of the three. Yet one only wishes that attention was given to the thematic interests of the film as well. Here Are the Young Men may be propulsive, but its thinly drawn characters are never given the room to break out of cliche.
Here Are the Young Men is now available on VOD.