If you’re fortunate enough to go to a four-year college, that can be an overwhelming adjustment from living at home. But there’s still something of a comforting bubble about the campus experience, from the reliable routines of dorm life to scheduled meals and classes to the fact you’re living in a community where the vast majority of your fellow citizens are within a few years of your age.
Post-graduation, that’s when the real world hits. That’s when you realize that after living your life in increments of eight years, four years, four years, it’s all wide open. It can be exhilarating, and it can be terrifying, and it can be paralyzing, and it’s mostly the latter two emotions for Natalia Dyer’s Annie in writer-director Jac Cron’s beautifully shot and almost achingly melancholy but unfortunately static “Chestnut.”
Cron’s feature debut is indicative of a filmmaker with exciting potential and there are moments when “Chestnut” achieves some perfect indie vibes, but despite the fine work from Dyer (“Stranger Things”) and co-stars Rachel Keller and Danny Ramirez, we’re left with the distinct feeling that these people aren’t as interesting or as complicated as they believe themselves to be. (Granted, that’s probably the case with the vast majority of us when we’re in our early 20s, but it doesn’t necessarily make for enough compelling material to carry a full-length film.)
Recent finance grad Annie is spending the summer in her Philadelphia college town before taking a job with a top firm in Los Angeles. You’d think Annie would want to head to L.A. and settle in before starting her career, but she’s already starting to doubt the decision, out of reluctance to move away from her widowed father. Also, she’s been toying around with the idea of becoming a writer, maybe a poet. (That sound you just heard was every poet in the world telling Annie not to give up the day job.)
With the requisite indie soundtrack setting the beat and the warm cinematography by Matt Clegg adding to the feeling of Annie being in between worlds, she finds herself drawn into the flirty, boozy, narcissistic world of Tyler (Rachel Keller from “Legion”) and Danny (Danny Ramirez from “Top Gun: Maverick”), two enormously attractive and slightly dangerous types who work together in a bar and act like a couple but aren’t actually a couple.
Annie is attracted to Danny, who can be charming but also insufferable (he’s the kind of guy who instantly judges you if you like a mainstream pop song) but she has an even stronger connection to Tyler, who is supremely self-confident and scalding hot and just a little bit sad (though Annie might not see that), because we get the distinct impression that Tyler is going to be hanging out at these same late-night places and doing the same drugs and getting into the same manufactured dramas a decade from now.
“Chestnut” flirts with electric sparks but winds up being kind of a tepid “Challengers.” Throughout, we get the distinct impression that Annie’s life is going to be a whole lot more interesting if she can rid herself of these two beautiful and alluring but selfish and shallow operators.