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FLAKES
Directed by Michael Lehmann
Produced by Jake Abraham & Gary Winick
Written by Chris Poche & Karey Kirkpatrick
Director of Photography, Nancy Schreiber
Edited by Nicholas C. Smith
Music by Jason Derlatka & Jon Ehrlich
Released by IFC First Take
USA 84 min. Not Rated
With Zooey Deschanel, Aaron Stanford, Keir O'Donnell, Ryan Donowho, Frank Wood, Izabella Miko & Christopher Lloyd

When the wacky record store from indie cult classic Empire Records took on the big bad corporate wolf, every arty, alternative misfit of the mid-1990’s cheered for their generation. I guess Flakes director Michael Lehmann decided it was time to give today’s crop of tight-panted and vintage-swathed bohemians the same celluloid ego trip, but he failed in almost every way.

Like in Empire Records, Flakes – a New Orleans breakfast cereal bar where a rare brand is savored like an ancient bottle of Barolo – is an independent business threatened by the soulless chain store mentality. Neal (Aaron Stanford) imagines himself a rock star on hold, spending his days working at Flakes instead of on his music. Miss Pussy Katz (Zooey Deschanel), his boho girlfriend, is eager to pry him away from his dead-end job so he could finally cut that “incendiary” album. When a junior entrepreneur steals the business concept and sets up a similar cereal shop across the street, Pussy joins him to bring down Flakes and liberate Neal from his distracting day job.

For anyone who’s ever strummed a guitar, the film’s a simple wish-fulfillment scenario, where effort equals fame and talent is implied. Maybe if it was dressed up with zanier acting and an indie rock soundtrack, this comedy would have worked as a spirited hipster anthem. But aside from some funky outfits, Christopher Lloyd’s performance as the goofy cereal bar owner, and a faint score with what sounds like a bored sitar, Lehmann takes a decidedly deadpan and minimalist approach. In trying to capture a blasé hipster drawl, the cast delivers their lines in a laughable monotone, practically sleepwalking through the film. At its worst, the script sounds like a poorly-penned bohemian manifesto, with grand, deliberately pithy statements about the evils of capitalism and the virtues of the arty. At its best, it feels like an episode of hipster reality TV, especially when Neil and Pussy lounge about their stylishly shabby flat, being silly, charming, and ordinary.

The originality of setting the film in New Orleans could have been its saving grace if not for the awkward representation of the city’s black majority. Except for one frisky Flakes customer, they are entirely absent from the foreground and only introduced as a large, impoverished horde. Considering the city’s recent history, they feel like human props, used as a hurried and unrelated social side note to an otherwise trivial film.

Between the clumsy treatment of New Orleans’s racial milieu and the diatribe against corporate American, Flakes doesn’t actually achieve the cultural relevance it may have been looking for. In the end, it is just a half-hearted comedic salute to art, glorified cigarette butts, and urban style. Yana Litovsky
December 19, 2007