About thirty years ago or so I saw a movie called Clerks. About two clerks, one at a convenience store and the other at a video store. These two men got up to whatever made their days interesting and or fun. This one the first taste of the mind of Kevin Smith I was exposed to. Ever since I’ve had a love-hate relationship with his movies. Some like Chasing Amy and Mallrats, I’ve loved, and others, like Clerks 2 and Tusk, I’ve hated.  He has had a love of pop culture and a lot of the things I love, so it makes sense he would tell an autobiographical story of a moment in his life in The 4:30 Movie.

Austin David (Austin Zajur) is like a lot of kids his own age in the 80s. He loves going to movies with his buddies, and pool parties with his friends and classmates and he’s looking to meet a nice girl he can go steady with. He tries to make this happen as he calls the girl of his dreams, Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong) to go on a date to a movie with him. The problem is things get out of control with his buddies which may end up costing him his chance with the girl of his dreams. This is an age-old coming-of-age story I’ve seen before, but not like this.

Smith has worked with a lot of actors in the past thirty or so years. So when he makes a new movie he tends to call in a lot of his old buddies. This movie is no different than many of his others in that regard. Ken Jeong plays the theater manager who causes a lot of issues for the main character, his friends, and his love interest. Hatley Quinn Smith, Justin Long, Jason Biggs, Rachel,  Dratch, Jason Lee, and Rosario Dawson, all have cameos as family members, theater audience members, or characters in fake movie trailers. 

Along with all the cameos the main stars of this autobiographical story Zajur, Agudong  Nicholas Cirillo as Burny, and Reed Northup as Belly are all revelations in this 80s period piece.  Smith infuses this movie with a lot of dialogue that fans can get behind if their film fans like I am. A lot of movie references are strewn around like kernels of popcorn in a concession stand at a theater. I was eating all of these up. I loved every reference in the script. The kids acted like this was a real-life story the way they spit out all of these pop culture references. 

What is so fun about this movie is that similar to The Grindhouse, which featured two films by Quentin Tarantino, Death Proof, and Robert Rodriguez, Planet Terror, it has fake trailers and even a fake movie featured in the movie theater scenes. There are also cameos in these as well as the main film.  ASTRO Blaster and the Braverman, a sci-fi type film, and Bucklick, based on a detective series of novels, are both ridiculous titles for a movie, but this is meant to be a lot of fun. Smith is clearly having a lot of fun at the expense of the audience watching. I loved all of it though.

There are a lot of things about The 4:30 Movie I enjoyed. From The Police T-shirt, the main character is wearing a Shaka Khan song playing on the radio for the self-reflection of one’s self and recording positive thoughts in a cassette recorder. These are all things I wish I had done at this age. Smith brought a lot of himself into this role. I’m sure making this movie was very emotional for him. Everything he did reminded him of himself. Including a great post-credits scene which was a little inside baseball for fans of the SMODCO Universe.  Which I’m sure all fans of his films will instantly recognize and love.

 The 4:30 Movie was so much. It reminded me of Smith films like Clerks and Mallrats. Two movies that infuse all the great pop culture references I love about his movies. These show me as a film fan how much he also loves them as much as the people who watch them. The autobiographical nature of the story was right up my alley. I felt like this story reminded me a lot of myself. The setting of the movie theater was as good as I possibly could have imagined.  The cameos and young cast of new actors were all funny and pretty good. These kids were revelations for sure. This movie is going to be a Smith fan’s dream, but anyone who loves nostalgia like I do will surely enjoy it as much as I did. 

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen