Gussied up

[March 14th, 2007] A boy and a girl meet at a Fourth of July party, a celebration with all the hallmarks of teenage independence: underage drinking, casual sex, passing out. She's bored. He's trashed. He tries to get her to go home with him—or at least to his parents' game room. She's not interested. He resorts to another tack. "I found this weird, fucking awesome pot in my brother's room," he mumbles. "Just a little sort of synopsis: it's awesome. And it'll make this party go from boring to fucking not boring in, like, 10."

The events of Dance Party, USA take longer than 10 minutes to go from boring to not boring. But in its measured, digressive way, the movie does become kind of awesome—or at least satisfying. The route it takes will be familiar to any Portlander, at least geographically: Director Aaron Katz, a native now living in New York City, coasts his digital-video camera past the Fremont Bridge and the Crystal Ballroom and finally through the gates of Oaks Amusement Park. And the faces may seem familiar, too, since Katz has cast his 66-minute coming-of-age anecdote entirely with City of Roses actors.

As Dance Party, USA progresses, it's hard to avoid another recognizable sensation—an Elephant in the room. Is that the ghost of director Gus Van Sant, Portland icon, hovering over the beer-soaked table? Yep. It may or may not be a coincidence that Katz's protagonist is named Gus (if not, it's a great joke, since the boy portrays himself as insatiably heterosexual), but none of the characters would exist without Van Sant and the cinema of languid angst he's been fashioning for the past five years. The shots of young people saying nothing, the piano score (by Keegan DeWitt, another onetime Portlander) keeping time with long, hand-held glides through the 'burbs, even the silent montage of fireworks: They herald the first movie of a guy who's seen Last Days.

But Katz offers something that Van Sant has been unwilling to surrender—a story. And it's a good story, about how young Gus (Cole Pesinger), a vulgar hotshot bragging about his bedroom exploits, gradually admits to being human. That's not an easy confession for him to make; he'd rather crow to his buddy Bill (Ryan White) about how he convinced a girl to suck his dick while hiding her face under a paper bag. Gus, in other words, is a 17-year-old piece of shit—a nightmare for parents and anybody who happens to be sitting within earshot on TriMet. But then comes that Fourth of July bash, and Jessica (Anna Kavan), the one girl who will tell him exactly what a little gargoyle he's turned himself into. With that scene, Dance Party, USA abandons the pretensions of vacant realism and, following its hero, becomes something more, and better. It declares its own independence.