Few films in the last decade have had a trajectory quite like Dinner in America.
The film stars Kyle Gallner as Simon, a chaotic and uncompromising punk rocker, and Emily Skeggs as Patty, an awkward girl who loves the punk band that she has no idea Simon is the frontman of. They meet, fall in love, get revenge on bullies, and take part in three different chaotic dinner set pieces.
After a years-long filmmaking process, the film was shot in 2018 and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020. Then came the pandemic, when the film played virtually at some other festivals.
I first got an email pitching a review of Dinner in America in May of 2022, pushing a release in “select theaters” that May 27 and a VOD release on June 7. That week, my old friend Sheila O’Malley published a review of the film on RogerEbert.com, calling it “a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.” I’m pretty sure that’s what landed the film on my radar, but I didn’t end up reviewing it until that October, after it landed on Hulu.
In my review, I called it “one of those smaller films that’s destined for cult status,” and while my predictions aren’t always right, I feel good that nailed that one. Adam Rehmeier would direct another very good movie, Snack Shack, in 2024.
The audience for Dinner in America slowly built for a while on Hulu. And at some point last year, the film became huge on TikTok, with users acting out scenes, sharing their favorite clips, singing along with the song “Watermelon, wishing for a love like that of Simon and Patty and yes, sometimes calling the film “problematic.” And that newfound popularity, as the New York Times covered in November, has landed the film back in theaters, where so few people saw it back in 2022.
Last week — five years to the day after that Sundance debut, in fact – Dinner in America had two showings, at least one of them sold out, at the Film Society Center in Philadelphia. The day before, we spoke to stars Kyle Gallner and Emily Skeggs, along with director Adam Rehmeier, about the film and that long five-year journey.
So are you guys doing a tour, or is it more of a series of on-off screenings?
Emily Skeggs (ES): Kind of like a tour.
Adam Rehmeier (AR): It’s a loose tour. There’s some dates in there, we’ve done some already.
Kyle Gallner (KG): Yeah, we’re popping in the ones that we can make, or can do, and then for the most part it’s all fan-driven. So the fans have been reaching out to the theaters, and the theaters have been reaching out to… Monument, and then Monument sets up the screenings.
I’m real fascinated by the trajectory of this film because I know it was at Sundance in 2020, and then there’s the pandemic, and then… I went back through my emails about this, and I think the first email I got pitching a review link was in the spring of ’22, and I don’t think I took them up right away because my review ran that Fall. I don’t know if that’s when you went on Hulu or something else, but I know that Sheila O’Malley with RogerEbert.com, who’s an old friend of mine, she really championed the film
AR: Yes.
I think probably reading her review was what inspired me to check it out, and I saw it, reviewed it, and really liked it at the time. And I just know that it’s one of those movies that seems like it would be really fun with an audience. Did it have a theatrical release at all, back then?
AR: Tiny. Coastal, tiny, like insignificant. We had talked about doing it slightly larger, there was talk at one point of doing, to my mind, maybe 25 to 30 screens, something like that, and it ended up being much smaller than that.
This was in ’22?
AR: This was in ’22.
I guess when theaters were still…
AR: Theaters were still… People were still masking, and there was still some aspect of social distancing, at this point.
When did you shoot it? I guess that was like ’18 and ’19?
AR: ’18. We shot it in ’18. I know, I know.
KG: Seven years ago?
ES: That’s insane!
AR: By the time we get to August, you know, July, August, September, it’ll be seven years.
KG: Whoa, my God. We old, man.
AR: My beard was a different color then. It was like Kyle’s hair.
