All About Who You Know ask the question, What if Abed from Community were a 22 year old white man in a 15 year old white boy’s body? The premise: a socially inept film school student who only relates to others through movies hatches a plan to catfish the beautiful, charming daughter of a famous Oscar-winning screenplay writer in order to get his script read. The script of this film is highly self-referential, its characters rarely step out of their pose as wry, moody recent graduates agonizing over their futures (or lack thereof) in the industry.
Probably my biggest qualms with this film are the distinct lack of work going on for most characters. Netflix’s Love does a really excellent job of setting the dramatic background of Hollywood creatives’ lives in shitty, mind-numbing, hostile work environments, and letting characters act out their self-destructive tendencies in those conditions. All About Who You Know is all about avoiding the genre clichés of romcoms (actually, a lot better at delivering that promise than Isn’t It Romantic), but it doesn’t mind the icky questions of class it leaves behind when it fails to depict most of its leads trying to earn money or contribute to society in any way.
Our protagonist, who often refers to himself as the protagonist, has no backstory except for his longstanding friendship with a high school and college bestie, no family, and no means of income, but his love of films and pick up artistry make up for these deficiencies. The love interest, whose forgiveness Friend describes as pushing the bounds of credulity, Haley spends so much time telling the men in her life “it’s cool” that they’ve serially lied to her that one has to imagine she has some serious co-dependency and enabling issues despite the fact that she seems perfectly personable and adjusted. Only the best friend, ‘Tin, seems like he has his act together, working as a gopher for a Netflix production, maintaining relationships, but also cultivating new ones to compensate for his absentee friend.
The script spends so much time tiptoeing around genre tropes that it actually ends up feeling a little artificial, like a stage play shot on camera, oddly divorced from the blocking on screen. The film deploys the device of offering forking paths of reality before pulling back to the character’s reality, which provides some entertaining moments of surreal comedy.
The major argument against All About Who You Know is that it suffers from a major empathy shortage. Our main character behaves like a mercenary psychopath, because he’s supposed to stand in for the audience’s worst selfish impulses, but he lacks redemption. At the most, he feels guilt, but he never fails to take advantage of the infinite patience of Haley, even up until the second to last scene at the lake house, when he’s yelling at her for not throwing him out. Haley, on the other hand, spends a lot of time justifying why she hasn’t been taken advantage of by the cloutchaser Coal and her deceitful father, even though its clear that she doesn’t have an escape plan or the means to emancipate herself from either relationship. The argument in favor of seeing this movie is that it’s a true love triangle with some smart one-liners about romcoms. The best observations are critiques of montages.
