[yasr_overall_rating]
“Mean Dreams” follows Casey and Jonas, two teenagers desperate to escape their broken and abusive homes and examines the desperation of life on the run and the beauty of first love.
There are two ways to approach “Mean Dreams”: one, as the second-last film of Bill Paxton, and two, as another low-quality entry in the lovers-on-the-run genre. This film will not be remembered in the same way of Paxton’s film career as “The Shootist” was to John Wayne either. It’s strange to see Paxton as a bad guy but the viewer understands why Paxton will be remembered as a great and often underused actor, he was capable of genuine performances in roles that otherwise would have come off as largely insincere and stilted.
The alcoholic, abusive single dad and law enforcement officer Wayne (Bill Paxton) moves to a small town in the midwest with his daughter Casey (Sophie Nelisse). Casey falls in love with a good ol’ boy, Jonas (Josh Wiggins) who is from a nearby farm. In the vein of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Tony Scott/Quentin Tarantino’s “True Romance” before them, Casey and Jona find an escape from the drudgery of daily life in a relationship with each other.
When Wayne attempts to drown Jonas after he witnesses his involvement in a crime, Jonas and Casey go on the run. From this point on, we’ve seen all the images and themes in “Mean Dreams” done a hundred times before, the innocence of youth, the power of love, the blurred moral lines of crime in many other films done better. The movie does nothing original with the sub-trope, is remarkably predictable, and offers very little in the way of entertainment. In fact, the characters in the film talk in a stilted and inorganic manner.
First-time screenwriters Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby haven’t attempted to do anything new or original with the screenplay and the strong cast cannot carry the flimsy script. For example, there are numerous occasions where Casey calls Jonas “cowboy” that just feel off. There are also a few monologs throughout that encompass elements first-time screenwriters would not be aware of and they just don’t work. The story attempts to revolve around heavy ideas like “Badlands” but can’t deliver them with the tone mostly feeling faked.
If I wasn’t familiar with the lovers-on-the-run genre, I might very well have liked “Mean Dreams” much more than I did. This particular genre is an important type of story and should have entries for each generation, but I was mostly left wondering what made “Mean Dreams” original enough to have gotten the film made.
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