There is no faulting the ambition of “Just Like Me and You,” Bob Davis’s wilfully strange campus drama, a film that would plainly rather fascinate and frustrate than simply please. Surreal, experimental and formally restless, it sets out to rewire the familiar coming-of-age template into something altogether more slippery. That it succeeds in feeling genuinely unusual is not in doubt. Whether its reach for profundity is matched by a story worth holding onto is a far thornier question.
The premise, at least, is quietly compelling. Joseph (TJ Wong) is a shy college freshman adrift in the alien world of campus life, trying to carve out an identity apart from his sister and his old high-school friends while grappling with the onset of hearing loss. That last detail is the film’s richest idea, and Davis makes evocative use of it, filtering the soundscape through Joseph’s hearing aid so that voices and noise warp and swim, placing the viewer inside his disorientation. It is an elegant conceit, and the film’s strongest claim on genuine feeling.
Into this uncertain world steps Kevin (Johnny Berchtold), a study partner whose blend of cleverness, cool and faint menace proves magnetic to a lonely outsider. Their deepening, destabilising dynamic becomes the film’s engine, and Davis steers it somewhere far stranger than campus realism, letting the narrative warp, double back and dissolve the ground beneath it. What begins as a recognisable coming-of-age tale slides into a hallucinatory, dream-logic register, a shape-shifting puzzle box of misdirection and quiet dread, all of it unfolding against the incongruous backdrop of a sun-bleached southern Californian university of biology classes and bible study.
For all that formal daring, though, the film struggles to make its characters land as people. The dialogue, reaching constantly for the oblique and the profound, too often tips into the unrealistic and the pretentious, the sound of a screenplay performing cleverness rather than human beings actually speaking. It is a register that keeps the viewer at arm’s length, admiring the construction while unable to care much about the souls supposedly trapped inside it, and the emotional connection the premise seems to promise never quite arrives.
That detachment is compounded by a narrative that grows harder to follow the more it contorts, and by an ending that offers little in the way of coherence or satisfaction. “Just Like Me and You” is so committed to its own enigma that it declines to resolve into anything graspable, and while some will find that open-endedness liberating, others will leave feeling that ambition has been mistaken for meaning, and obscurity for depth.
There will be an audience for this, viewers happy to surrender to a riotous, brain-bending mood piece and to prize texture and ideas over clarity and warmth. But for all its undeniable inventiveness and its one genuinely affecting idea, “Just Like Me and You” finally proves a difficult film to love, admirably unafraid to alienate, yet alienating in ways that feel less like a provocation earned than a connection missed.