Alpha Dog

Directed by Nick Cassavetes

A noted local enthusiast confessed to me his hard-to-argue feeling that Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets had the worst influence of any film in memory. Specifically, he lamented that it was the impetus behind more rotten indie films than any other. Alpha Dog confirms his fear. It doesn’t imitate the things that made Mean Streets great (Scorsese’s now-forgotten moral conflict between the church and the street; the romantic irony of pop music and movies; the embrace of working-class ethnic culture). Rather, Alpha Dog recapitulates the doltish misunderstanding of Mean Streets as adolescent noir that has become a commonplace of film culture.

This Southern California-set story follows a brood of drug-dealing white young adults who have no religious background, use hip-hop music videos for porn-stimulation and feed upon each other as if reflecting the antagonism of cruel suburbia. Emile Hirsch as weed-seller Johnny Truelove provokes Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster), a junky who owes him money; Johnny then kidnaps Jake’s little brother Zack (Anton Yelchin), first for ransom, then for murderous revenge. Despite this overly contrived plot, director Nick Cassavetes goes for the same slice of low-life seen in all the other half-ass Mean Streets imitations from Laws of Gravity to Blow to Better Luck Tomorrow.

Cassavetes lacks Scorsese’s autobiographical impulse. It’s obvious that Alpha Dog was conceived as a slick way of capitalizing on the phenomenon of hip-hop’s influence on the young, white middle class. Cassavetes pretends that his cast of bad-ass wannabes (including Justin Timberlake as Johnny’s best friend, the heavily-tattooed, weightlifting Frankie Ballenbacher) has the same jolt of realism as Scorsese’s urban Italian clan. It turns out that this is an even worse miscalculation. Not only is the stress on ghetto-slang incredulous (Timberlake actually puts his lips to “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge and go fuck some bitches”), but Cassavetes’ dialogue mistakes repeated inanities for natural language and numerous, aimless party scenes as documents of adolescent anomie.

The specters of De Niro and Keitel also seem to haunt Alpha Dog. The cast is acting out “puberty” more than portraying the style of a particular milieu. Their swaggering is as unkempt as their scraggily half-beards. It’s shocking to recall that Hirsch previously appeared in more credible teen-angst films The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and Catherine Hardwick’s superb The Lords of Dogtown (which recreated the origins of California’s skateboarding culture with verve and credibility). Hirsch’s Johnny is a barely motivated slug. Ben Foster seems to base Jake on a wild Ryan Gosling impersonation; he goes so prodigiously out-of-control he throws the story off-balance: Mad Jake is instantly more interesting than Timberlake’s lightweight Frankie. Star-minded Cassavetes almost makes an entirely different movie in the scenes emphasizing kindhearted Frankie bonding with the doomed, puppyish 15-year-old Zack. Call it: Rebels Without Claws.

If there hadn’t been a Mean Streets, Alpha Dog might never have been made. Scorsese’s seriousness seems to retroactively inspire Cassavetes’ promiscuous mimicking of youth movie tropes, including the use of intertitles that chart time/place/witnesses as if this were a juvenile delinquency procedural. He even flirts with homoeroticism like a timid Larry Clark. But without Mean Streets’ personal stakes, this view of youth feels ersatz like a late-’50s exploitation film. (Family scenes featuring Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone as worried parents are especially arch.)

The title Alpha Dog links the millennium’s fashionable notion of guiltless male instinct (greed) with the pop glamour of reductive identity (the low self-esteem made cool by hip-hop). As a result, the starkness of youth experience that went largely unspoken until Mean Streets summarized several generations of ambivalent teenage morality is updated here, but it also gets transformed into the latest So-Cal, MTV clichés. No wonder Cassavetes’ title also seems like the name of an overhyped rock band.