Jack & Diane

2012 "Love is a monster."
4.5| 1h50m| R| en
Details

The romance between two teenage girls quickly manifests as terrifying, violent and inexplicable.

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

Stream on any device, 30-day free trial Watch Now

Trailers & Clips

Reviews

Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.
2hotFeature one of my absolute favorites!
Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Staci Frederick Blistering performances.
goldfingr56 I only gave it a 2 rather than a 1 since the relationship between the two was of interest, which is a guess is the major plot of these gal pals but really has nothing else to offer. Since the minimum lines which one must write is ten, I must continue.Since I must write, write, and write more, I choose to write about why more of this film is a waste of your time. Although the girls, especially the actress playing Diane are easy on the eyes, it would have been interesting of the "monster" had some real implications, a la like maybe the "Howling" but this route was not taken unfortunately!The actress's performances were fine, that alone makes this story one which is able to me followed. There, are those enough lines for this review?
Chris Smith (RockPortReview) Writer/director Bradley Rust Gray's debut feature "The Exploding Girl" was a mild indie success with its star Zoe Kazan, a twenty-something girl dealing with life and relationship issues. It's a slow burn character study that felt very real and relatable and looked to be a good starting point for the young filmmaker. His follow up film "Jack and Diane" is here and it has taken a pretty vicious critical beating. It stars current "It" girl Juno Temple and Riley Keough in a brief but intense affair, that includes metaphoric intercuts with a werewolf like beast. The film also features brief stop motion tidbits from the brilliant Quay Brothers. In some ways I think it has been unfairly picked on and doesn't deserve such a thrashing.Diane (Temple) is a British girl in New York City who while trying to find a phone runs into Jack (Keough) the stereotypical tomboy. The two girls are complete opposites. Diane is tiny, meek and insecure. While Jack puts up a tough and rigid exterior, full of false self confidence. After partying the night before, Jack is hit by a car while on her skateboard and for the rest of the film she has a nasty scrape on the side of her face. We find out both characters are caring around some heavy emotional baggage.Diane has frequent nosebleeds and strange dreams about a big nasty beast ripping people apart, but this is by no means a horror movie. The animated sequences are thick strands of hair moving around the inside of a persons body like a rope tightening around a heart. It's sticky, grimy and a little gross, but then again so are some of the critics. Early on in their relationship Jack finds out that Diane is leaving for Paris in a few weeks and she tries to distance herself and forget everything about her, but she can't. Eventually they start to embrace the time they have left together. The film does feel a little awkward and strange but then again this is what the characters are feeling. The story also meanders and goes in a few different directions but overall I didn't find it annoying. Towards the end of their time together Jack starts getting the nose bleeds and having these awful visions almost like Diane infected her with something.I know I'm in the minority on this but I kind of dug the film. It's currently available on Netflix watch instantly, so take a chance and give it a watch.
Antonia Alverez It was not an horror, drama or comedy; moreover, it was not a good mix of these genres. I could not laugh, could not get scared or felt emotional about anything that is going on in the movie. Mainly, they might want to tell a teenage lesbian story, but they did it in a such a cheap and simple way with very bad cliché dialogue and scenes that you just want to laugh at it. Kylie Minogue plays a small part in the movie, and evidently chosen to make the movie more attractive with her beauty. 23-year-old Juno Temple looks like a early bloomed teenage girl which is also one of the many disturbing and weird things about the movie. At the end of the movie I asked to myself "what was that movie all about?" It's simply a bad movie and waste of time.
The_Film_Cricket To be clear, Jack and Diane has nothing whatsoever to do with John Cougar Mellencamp's 1982 song of the same name. That song was a brilliant piece of Americana about two kids, a boy and a girl, growing up in Middle America. This movie is a disorganized piece of indie "realism" about two girls in New York who approach falling in love with one another. The problem is that the movie doesn't have enough confidence in its characters to develop them in a way that makes us care.The major focus of the film is Diane (Juno Temple), a wide eyed Brit with a mop of blonde hair who chooses baby doll dresses to be her ever-present wardrobe. She's a cute girl who misbehaves, drinks to the point of vomiting and has frequent nosebleeds. The other girl is Jack (Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis) a skate-boarding butch lesbian, a loner who finds something to like about this dysfunctional Diane.The girls meet in a store one day and have a few shy, awkward exchanges before Diane has another nosebleed. The nosebleeds are never explained nor followed up and neither is a scene in which Jack is hit by a car immediately following their initial meeting. There are a lot of things in this movie that happen that are never really explained. The frustration of this movie is that the love affair happens in episodes, not in continuity.There is something in these two girl that, in a better movie, might have made for a pure down-to-earth love story. The problem is that the screenplay won't have it. It keeps intercutting their budding relationship with a lot of episodic nonsense, like a silly scene in which Diane escapes into the bathroom to shave her pubic area, or the reoccurring microscopic images of something monstrous growing inside of Diane that are perhaps supposed to be manifestations of her twisted feelings about Jack. We see internal organs with hair slithering tightly around them, but we are left to assume what that might be. We are led to believe that it is the manifestation of this new lifestyle but you're never really sure. The scenes are disgusting and fall on the story like a ton of bricks.Those scenes seem to indicate that the filmmakers didn't know how to create characters with genuine emotions. The screen presence of the two girls but what they have to talk about is dull and uninteresting when it isn't being intruded upon by another dramatic element. The movie moves away from their relationship as an effort to keep from having to really deal with them. This is a very confused movie that leaves you scratching you're head when it's over.