Harmony and Me

Directed by Bob Byinton

At MoMA theaters September 18–24

Runtime: 75 min.

Writer/director Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me is like the mumblecore version of a Terry Southern comedy. Full of anarchic energy and a revolving door set of cameos from Austin Texas’ film scene, it takes Southern’s love of absurd, disorientingly staccato confrontations and gives it a lo-fi tweak. That’s because, unlike Southern’s comedies, where any given protagonist is never as important as the trip they’re on, the plot of Harmony and Me is grounded in the perspective of its snarky young protagonist. Which means it’s intermittently more smarmy and quirky than charming and surreal but never enough to make it lose its indomitable momentum.

Proving that he’s the go-to leading guy for mumblecore comedies, Justin Rice plays Harmony, an oblivious, skinny jeans-clad emotional wreck who just can’t get over Jessica (Kristen Tucker), his last girlfriend. He tries to stay afloat by burying himself in work as well as friends’ condolences, but he can’t help himself from making his depression worse by intentionally bumping into Jessica and telling everyone within earshot that she hasn’t “broken my heart, she’s breaking my heart. She’s in the process of breaking my heart.”

The world according to Harmony is a mopey black comedy. Friends and family only condescend to understand what’s going on, co-workers and innocent bystanders look like three-headed aliens speaking a new dialect of Esperanto and his still-fresh trauma is rapidly becoming fodder for songs he’s writing in the “White guy with an acoustic guitar” mode.

Byington capably transforms Harmony’s bitter worldview into a series of stop-and-go sketches that nearly always deliver. In the final moments, however, we're reminded that we’re being shown the world through the eyes of a sneering misanthrope at his most self-indulgent. Which is par for the course for this strain of contemporary comedy but, sometimes, it’s hard not to roll your eyes at—and not with—Harmony.