Adapting Downtown Owl, the novel by Chuck Klosterman, co-directors Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, who also wrote the screenplay, deliver a messy, aimless film. It has moments of intrigue that are quickly extinguished by the film’s attempts at doing too much. The film’s depiction of small town life in the early 80s is grim, but if it had centered on the ways in which its characters feel stuck it might have made up for everything else. The adaptation is a missed opportunity made up of scattered pieces with no clear vision.
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Julia (Rabe) lands a teaching job in Owl, North Dakota in the fall of 1983. She claims she’s giving her husband some space to finish writing, but there’s a palpable tension that lives beneath the surface. Owl is so small that even the theater closed, and there isn’t all that much to do but drink excessively, which is what Julia starts doing after being invited out to the local bar by Naomi (Vanessa Hudgens). Julia takes a liking to Vance (Henry Golding), a former football player turned rancher, but is put off when he keeps his distance, and befriends retired football coach Horace (Ed Harris) who eases her transition to small town life. Meanwhile, a few of Julia’s students implore her to do something about a predatory coach.

Downtown Owl has a certain charm about it at first, but that doesn’t last too long. If you think the story is leading somewhere, you’ll be disappointed to find that it doesn’t amount to anything substantial. The ending is abrupt and strange, as though it’s meant to make us feel deeply about these characters that never get the development they deserve. The script doesn’t properly serve any of them, and you’ll be hard-pressed to feel anything but indifference. By the time Julia decides she’s ready to live the life she wants on her own terms, we might be inclined to simply shrug in response. When even the characters themselves don’t seem very invested in what’s going on around them — Julia’s response to a coach (Finn Wittrock) dating a teen girl (Arden Michalec) is “What if it’s love?” — then why should we?

There is some effort to establish the collective feeling of jadedness and dread that encapsulates the town, but the film’s focus is too jumbled to make it work. It’s also tonally inconsistent. The journey towards its ending is as aimless as its characters, and even the creative decisions, interesting on their own, don’t offer much depth; they’re merely good ideas that don’t come together cohesively. It leaves us with a feeling that the chaos is unintentional, there only because Linklater and Rabe don’t have a firm grasp on the source material. The characters have a myriad of flaws and plights that would have made them compelling, but the film fails to explore them beyond the surface.

All this makes Downtown Owl rather hollow. The potential is lost, and it’s hard to decipher what the film was ultimately going for, especially with the haphazard treatment of its story and characters. It leaves us feeling confused and lost when pondering the film’s message, and it doesn’t help that the execution leaves much to be desired. Ultimately, a few bright spots aren’t enough to make Downtown Owl worthwhile viewing.

Downtown Owl screened at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. The film is 91 minutes long and not yet rated.