Don’t Trip: Film Review

“Hollywood is a traditional American town with traditional American values. Salt of the earth.”

Some things are so quintessentially Los Angeles that they don’t need to be explained; we accept them to be self-evident.

“Don’t Trip,” the directorial feature debut from Alex Kugelman (streaming now on Tubi), spins one of these clichés into a psychological romp down the rabbit hole of power and influence in Hollywood. Certainly not the first film to ask, “How far would you go to get your big break?”, it instead builds out from that canned premise to ask something more germane to anyone who has ever tried to sneaking their screenplay under a producer’s door, pretended to be someone’s assistant to get into an awards party, or maybe smuggled a lion into a hotel room to create buzz for their Tarzan project.

If everyone in this town is willing to go to the mattresses to kickstart their dream, then should we be surprised when the hands at the levers of power manipulate them?

When young screenwriter Dev (Matthew Sato) loses his lower-rung industry job as an assistant for trying to use the office client’s list as a launching point for his script, he could take the admonishment as a lesson in etiquette. The way Kugelman frames the termination conversation (had over a phone call as his boss glad-handles over brunch), informs us that he didn’t actually overstep any boundaries. He just did it in a way that was perceived as unflattering to her.

Grind culture only grinds in one direction.

But Dev is young, and naive enough, to take the setback in stride, soon hatching a plan to backdoor his movie into the lap of one of the Hollywood power broker’s through a chink in his armor: his nepo baby son Trip. It’s Hollywood. The line drawn between stalking and networking is obscure, okay?

With just a few clicks on his phone, he is crashing a backyard party hosted by Trip looking for any angle necessary to spark a friendship. In a convincing happenstance the two quickly bond in an alchemy of shame. Dev is willing to beg, borrow and steal to get a foot in the door – Tripp has a foot against the door because he is snorting cocaine on the other side.

Played by newcomer Will Sennett, Trip steals the movie as the Echo Park garage-dwelling poet, huckster, stunt comic, spiritualist who is never quite the rube that Dev supposes. Sennett modulates the performance in delectable notes that swing from petulance to remorse so subtly that you never get a true sense of when he is lying. Even when he says some of the most outlandish things he walks them back instantly by claiming it was a joke.

Who knows which of Trip’s lies have a percentage of truth behind them?

It should be unnerving, but Dev walks a patient line because he needs to keep his con going. Though the budget probably did not allow for it, an off-screen scene in which the two go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the middle of the night is one of the film’s comedic missed opportunities. Kugelman’s script is so funny in other scenes that I found myself wishing the NA meeting scene existed just to watch these characters squirm to improv personal stories of scraping rock-bottom.

When Dev has no idea what rock-bottom is.

The film leans towards the comedy side of the horror/comedy lane which allows Sennett, in the supporting role, to push the envelope of cringe-inducing humor. When he invites Dev to his parent’s house in the hills for an industry party he offers him a tour of his dad’s sex dungeon where he “ties young actresses to a dentist’s chair.” Seeing that the house tour joke didn’t land with the desired effect he turns the stereotype against his audience.

You think every powerful man in Hollywood has a soundproof room in their house with automated locks on the only door in or out to enact their immoral fantasies on pliable young flesh? Well, that’s a weird assumption to make.

“All that evil Hollywood sex stuff, that’s the lamestream media. Okay? Thats’ the Poo York Times. Okay? Don’t believe their lies,” Tripp tells him.

It is just one, in a long line of red flags that Dev has been ignoring since the two paired up. Like a symbiotic relationship of two fish slowly descending to the bottom of a man-made lake.

“Don’t Trip” is a sardonic debut that will make anyone with a screenplay in their backseat both chortle in recognition of its tropes, and wince in how complicit we are by allowing them to endure.