Andrew Adams’ earliest inspiration for American Meltdown came when he was studying film at Florida State University: Someone broke into his apartment.

“It was brutal. I just came home and stuff was missing, and glass was everywhere, and the police came, but I developed a sort of PTSD from it, and then went out and bought new versions of all the stuff that had been stolen,” Adams recalls.

“And then, like, a month later, it all got stolen again in a second break-in.”

The robbery helped form his approach to life — and even his creative aesthetic.

“The emotional journey I went on was that I had all this stuff that meant a lot to me, it got stolen, I bought it again, it got stolen again — and so I just stopped buying it,” he says. “And so I was forced to start downsizing my life, and it started to make me less materialistic. And so the ultimate outcome of having been broken into was that I cared about stuff less.”

American Meltdown is also a story about downsizing, and coming of age at a tenuous time economically — a time when not caring too much about material things was a crucial advantage. Adams graduated in 2009, amid the housing market collapse and recession. He worked on scripts and films while establishing himself as a director and producer of adventure travel videos.

But when Covid lockdowns meant no more travel, he started thinking about how to make a film that would touch on the financial shakiness of the last 15 years.

American Meltdown writer-director Andrew Adams. Photo by Mark Evans, courtesy of Adams.

American Meltdown stars Jacki Von Preysing as Olivia, a young woman who is temporarily laid off from her job (as a way of denying her benefits) after a breakup. After the apartment she and her ex (Christopher Mychael Watson) shared is broken into, Olivia meets Mari (Nicolette Sweeney), a thief with a rich and complicated past, now living out of her van.

As Olivia and Mari’s lives become closely enmeshed, Olivia’s struggle to keep her apartment becomes a metaphor for generational financial woes: Should she give up? Make the kind of grim, exploitative compromises her property manager (Clayton Farris) seems to be suggesting? Burn it all down?

“I started drawing all these parallels between having all these ambitions that got shattered by the recession, and then the same thing happening with Covid,” Adams recalls. “All those emotions started to filter into what I was trying to make, a genre thriller.

“And then as that married to this emotional journey of leaving all your stuff behind, it started to just turn into a much more personal story about how these two people deal with everything that they thought they had being yanked away from them.”

Rather than waiting for a big studio to rain down funding, Adams wrote American Meltdown so that it could be shot on a budget of just $70,000, using readily available locations. Despite the strict budgeting, the film feels expansive, seizing on Adams’ Los Angeles-area environs: a Newport Beach pier, a gorgeous apartment in Topanga, stretches of desert where Adams could not only shoot #vanlife scenes but also ignite, with cinematographer Mark Evans, a spectacular conflagration.

American Meltdown and Capturing the Moment

Jacki Von Preysing as Olivia, left, and Nicolette Sweeney as Mari in American Meltdown. Quiver.

The film’s distributor, Quiver, wittily or serendipitously set the film’s release with zeitgeisty timing: It arrived the same week as a presidential election that seems to have hinged, in large part, on disappointment about the economy.

Adams, who grew up in a Maryland suburb, believes there is a fairly wide sense among middle-class millennials that the previous two generations had it easier.

“I think there’s this expectation that you’re going to grow up and it’s going to be so easy to get a house. I did so much research into how graduating into the recession impacted salaries, and how frustrated so many millennials are with housing prices, and this feeling that this thing that we all thought was a given is not,” he says.

One of the strengths of American Meltdown, though, is that it’s not a gloomy list of economic complaints: It’s a sly, atmospheric mystery thriller that won Best Feature at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where it premiered last year, and Best Screenplay at FilmQuest. (It also won Best Feature at a slew of other festivals.)

The film brims with energy thanks in part to charismatic, striking performances by Von Preysing and Sweeney. The film draws on both actresses’ real-life experiences.

“Jacki, I’ve always thought, is full of personality and quirk, and is an amazing character actress,” says Adams. “But I think because she’s a pretty blonde, gets called in for different kinds of roles, and has always kind of struggled to find where she lands. But I was like, ‘I can distill that!’”

Sweeney was trying to figure out her next steps in life when she auditioned for American Meltdown — which put her in a perfect mindset to play the rootless Mari.

Jacki Von Preysing as Olivia, left, and Nicolette Sweeney as Mari in American Meltdown. Quiver.

“She weirdly had just gotten out of a seven-year relationship and was kind of like living on people’s couches and being kind of nomadic and reassessing her own life journey and what would bring her joy and happiness.”

She auditioned with a monologue about that very idea — “and she was literally living through it,” Adams says.

Though American Meltdown proves Adams’ filmmaking verve, even while stretching a budget, he’s also thinking big. Among his other scripts is one co-written by Charles Ingram that is a little bit Indiana Jones and a little bit King Kong — a story of a 1930s Hollywood stuntman pulled into a real South American adventure called Untitled Adventure Picture.

It’s rollicking and funny and smart, but it’s also about recognition — who gets it and who doesn’t.

“What I’m trying to figure out is how to make things that are personal and meaningful to audience members — and entertaining as hell, stylish and cinematic,” Adams says. “Crime and horror and genre pieces are great avenues to make people watch, and then they’ll deliver something real.”  

American Meltdown is available for purchase on Amazon Prime, and other options are here.

Main image: Jacki Von Preysing in American Meldtown, written and directed by Andrew Adams. Courtesy of Quiver.