Jerrod Carmichael’s feature-length directorial debut, On the Count of Three, is a weird, lively contrivance: a self-consciously gimmicky buddy flick that’s informed with jolts of anguish and gallows humor. This is a film with a split personality, suggesting an episode of Atlanta hatched by artists who are enthralled with certain coming-of-age clichés. Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.
Val (Carmichael) is a not-quite-young man stuck in a holding pattern selling mulch and gravel, though his supervisor informs him that he has the potential to ascend their company’s management ladder. Val instead quits the job and tries and fails to hang himself in a bathroom stall. Undeterred, he looks up his longtime friend, Kevin (Christopher Abbott), who’s in a hospital for attempting to kill himself a few days earlier. Val springs Kevin out and they decide to have one final day before mutually killing one another in a grand sendoff. The opening of the film, a flashforward, shows the men holding pistols to one another’s faces, in the sort of self-pityingly macho gesture of ultraviolence that often figure into John Woo’s films.
For all its stripped-down style and youthful cred, the film is built on a plot that could’ve been workshopped by cynical studio executives looking to fuse Thelma & Louise with Scent of a Woman. Those movies were audience-flattering pablum that peddled watered-down nihilism as self-help, as is On the Count of Three, though Carmichael doesn’t take the plot too seriously, utilizing it instead as a rack on which to hang brutally absurdist set pieces.
Several scenes in the film capture the inscrutable instability of life in general, seesawing between flippancy, tenderness, and tragedy. Most impressive and surprising is a moment when Val and Kevin visit Val’s father (J.B. Smoove), a recovering addict who abused and stole from his son. Val’s father initially assumes the role of the contrite parent, a role we’ve seen played out in many films and television shows dealing with aggrieved children, until he’s suddenly pushed into showing his true colors, attacking Val with a savageness that Carmichael stages with a shocking straight face, while a Big Mouth Billy Bass serves as a dry sight gag in the foreground of the frame. Such colliding tones and textures momentarily intensify On the Count of Three, as other interludes, especially those featuring Henry Winkler as a psychiatrist with a secret, offer banal explanations for Val and Kevin’s alienation.
Abbott and Carmichael are the through lines uniting the film’s highs and lows. Abbott might be the most self-consciously intense actor working in the American indie scene—a tendency he parodies here with a playfulness that suggests the gonzo malleability of Nicolas Cage. As Kevin, Abbott pushes moments to operatic levels of violent melancholia, only to pull back with a deflating smirk or oddball gesture that acknowledges his and the script’s bathos. Abbott is in and out of the role at once, which is ideal for a character given to theatrically acting out his nevertheless genuine despair. Meanwhile, Carmichael offers a quieter though no less funny counterpoint, imbuing Val with a heaviness that complements and refutes Kevin’s freneticism. Together, Abbott and Carmichael enliven a typical buddy-comedy scenario, stylizing the sort of self-mythologizing routines that people forge with longtime friends.
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