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The Only Living Boy In New York is DOA

THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK (Marc Webb). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (August 25). See listing. Rating: N


If you only see one movie named for a Paul Simon track this year, make it Baby Driver.

The other option, Marc Webb’s The Only Living Boy In New York, is a pretentious, affected, thoroughly obnoxious drama about a directionless young man who starts sleeping with his dad’s mistress. 

There’s no reason for this, other than the fact that noble Thomas (Callum Turner, of Green Room and Tramps) can’t get the girl he really wants (Kiersey Clemons) to sleep with him, and when he finds out Dad (Pierce Brosnan) is cheating on Mom (Cynthia Nixon) he decides to shadow the other woman (Kate Beckinsale). 

Confrontation leads to attraction, and before you know it they’re carrying on an affair of their own – which might mean Thomas is ceding the moral high ground, but at least it gives him some good stories to tell his new neighbour (Jeff Bridges).

This film marks director Webb’s return to small-scale cinema after his Amazing Spider-Man movies, and much like Colin Trevorrow’s The Book Of Henry it’s utterly detached from reality, either physical or emotional. 

Set in and around the publishing world – Thomas’s dad is a publisher, Beckinsale’s character is an editor and the neighbour is a writer – Allan Loeb’s screenplay has literary aspirations but plays like fifth-rate Woody Allen. 

Thomas mentions a band named after the boiling point of heroin characters in their 20s opine that New York has “lost its soul” at dinner parties. Loeb’s most recent screen credits, The Space Between Us and Collateral Beauty, do not speak to a life lived soulfully.

And Webb’s self-consciously artful direction, complete with a mopey montage built around the title song, validates all my misgivings about his breakout picture (500) Days Of Summer. He’s less an innovator than a borrower, assembling ideas and sentiments without really thinking about how they fit together. And in this movie, nothing fits.

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