Review: The Beach Bum Is a Blissed-Out Ode to Falling Off the Map

Florida occupies a special place in the imagination as our country’s ultimate symbol of leisure. But for those who like to fall off maps and have the means to do so, it’s a very real place where one can inhabit a luxuriant dream state. Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers turned the Gulf Coast into an expression of teenage America’s collective id during the Obama years, when millennials were entering the national consciousness as the debauched harbingers of the death of everything. And with the release of The Beach Bum, which sets about charting boomers’ and Gen Xers’ backslide into hedonism, Korine solidifies his position as the premier cartographer of the Sunshine State as a place of unhurried pursuits.

We first encounter The Beach Bum’s hero, Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), in a state of self-indulgent glee, which remains unwavering for the remainder of the film. A revered poet who spends his time and his wife Minnie’s (Isla Fisher) money on women, alcohol, and drugs, the man is busy not writing his next great work in Key West. He’s a genius burnout living among less-inspired burnouts, and the typically self-parodying McConaughey fully embodies Moondog’s laidback attitude in slack-jawed, freewheeling, and unfussy fashion.

When Moondog is called up to Miami for his daughter Heather’s (Stefanie LaVie Owen) wedding, the viewer gets a sense of the man’s family life. Moondog and Minnie’s marriage, however odd, is touching for the couple’s affectionate, mutual tolerance and respect; while they both sleep around, neither wavers in their love for one another. Moondog and Minnie are committed to their chill approach to life, spending a night of substance-addled joy and reverie together after Heather’s wedding. But after Minnie’s sudden death, Moondog is forced to finish his next book in order to claim his half of her will, a process that he recognizes is for his own good. So, the Jimmy Buffettesque bohemian sets on his way, traipsing across Key West and Miami, partying and finding inspiration wherever he goes.

The Beach Bum’s bevy of only-in-Florida characters, decked in garishly inspired outfits, helps Moondog’s picaresque trek sustain its intense sense of euphoria. This is a world with no comedowns, only higher highs. His best friend, Lingerie, played by Snoop Dogg, is, well, essentially just Snoop Dogg. Down the road, he meets Flicker (Zac Efron), the amphetaminic son of a pastor who exuberantly robs senior citizens without remorse because “Christ already died for our sins.” And later he meets up with Captain Wack (Martin Lawrence), a cash-only dolphin tour guide with a parrot that’s, of course, addicted to cocaine.

These characters, ridiculous but lovingly rendered and all acted in frenzied ways, form the tapestry of Moondog’s world. Their friendships with him are built on sincerity and trust in a common philosophy of fun at all costs, which, however frivolous, holds them fast to one another. All of Korine’s films emphasize the personal commitment that comes with finding spiritual siblings, no matter how violent, disturbed, or abnormal these individuals may be. The Beach Bum is his most tender elaboration on the point, and sans mawkishness.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in the boys’ club. A car crash, a cop chase, a blind airplane pilot, a shark attack—Moondog skirts the danger all around him with a laugh, as do his friends. Mostly, at least. This invincibility evokes the ease that comes with knowing that one is a privileged being. As writer Ayesha Siddiqi recently pointed out in a roundup of 2018 trends for Ssense, the white Florida dad is “the most politically protected person in America.” Moondog himself proffers a theory of “anti-paranoia” that the world is conspiring to make him happy, and the flipside of this is reflected in The Beach Bum’s less savory jokes. In a film largely centered around male interactions, its women are often sidelined as sexual objects, and several jokes use trans women in particular as the punchline.

Despite its lax, vignette-like quality, The Beach Bum is perhaps Korine’s most straightforward film to date, even while its form fully embraces its inherently circuitous, nonsensical subject matter. Indeed, the way Moondog buoyantly moves from locale to locale, Korine’s semi-elliptical style, and a tendency for events to just happen lend the film a chronic haziness where even life-threatening occurrences are treated with a cheery dementia. At one point, a character loses a limb, but it’s “just a flesh wound”—something to quickly move on from and to the next toke. Not for nothing has Korine likened The Beach Bum’s structure to pot smoke.

The film’s dreamy, associative style is pitched to its characters’ almost random inclinations, while mirroring the spatiotemporal dilation of a high. Its sloshing headspace is externalized by cluttered bungalows and colorific public places, captured by DP Benoît Debie in psychedelic but controlled fashion. As a matter of principle, everywhere that a colored light can be shone, it is, including every patch of sea water and sky. With only slight fear of hyperbole, it can be said that in few other films has Florida’s water appeared so multifarious and fun to look at, appearing at times deep blue, blue-green, green, green-brown, mucky, and gold.

Korine is a great elaborator of the bromidic, pushing our most banal sayings to their limits. If 2007’s Mister Lonely, about a commune of celebrity impersonators, is the imagined playpen of “be yourself,” then The Beach Bum is “the most important thing in life is to have fun” boiling over. The film repeatedly returns to Richard Brautigan’s “The Beautiful Poem,” which Korine’s script attributes to Moondog. Brautigan’s original poem, altered for the film, reads:

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.

The first time Moondog reads it, at a Jimmy Buffett concert to a group of seniors, it sounds like a joke. The poem embodies Moondog’s chauvinistic, reckless demeanor. But when it’s read again more soberly later on, over a montage of Moondog and Minnie together, it becomes mournful and overtly conscious of mortality. The last verse now conveys a pained sense that pleasure, like poetry, love, and friendship, can be cultivated as a thin cushion between life and death. The sentiment would be laughable if it weren’t also true.