Jesse Eisenberg wasn’t the only Squid and the Whale star who brought an A24-backed debut to Cannes. Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, produced by the Safdies and shot by Sean Price Williams, premiered at Directors’ Fortnight to strong acclaim, and ahead of an August 26 theatrical and VOD release, the first trailer and poster have arrived for this darkly funny drama set in the world of a suburban NJ comic store.
As Leonardo Goi said in his review, “The deranged lunatics populating Owen Kline’s absurdist, bleakly hilarious Funny Pages are all somewhat anachronistic; loners who gravitate around old things and old places, one foot always firmly rooted in the past. Even teenage Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) nurses what feels like an age-inappropriate nostalgia. A high school senior stranded in an anonymous suburban stretch of Princeton, NJ, he works at the local comic store while daydreaming of becoming a cartoonist himself. But the comics he loves and devours with pantagruelian appetite are much, much older than him—the kind of niche, underground relics no one seems to recognize, much less appreciate. Funny Pages tracks Robert’s coming of age, but Kline (here in his directorial feature debut) dexterously avoids the genre’s trappings. His isn’t just a portrait of a most complicated chapter in a young man’s life, but an homage, in turns affectionate and savage, to an untimely culture and untimely breed of people, forever out of synch with the world around them.”
Find the preview and poster below:
Funny Pages opens on August 26.