Pick your mentors carefully: Without any overt lectures or lesson plans for the audience, that’s the ink- and blood-stained takeaway in “Funny Pages,” a bracingly harsh coming-of-age comedy from a debut feature filmmaker.
It opens in theaters and on VOD Friday. As a bonus, it’s the least festive Christmas movie since “Bad Santa,” and a lot gutsier.
The son of Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline, writer-director Owen Kline played the younger of the two boys in Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale.” Behind the camera, Kline works in the vein of three filmmakers in particular, all of whom were producers on “Funny Pages”: Josh and Benny Safdie, whose early, exhilarating works (the NYC portrait in parental mania ”Daddy Longlegs,” the addiction odyssey “Heaven Knows What”) and more recent, starrier projects (”Uncut Gems”) intersect with that of the Safdies’ frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein (”Frownland,” a microbudget wonder of relational panic).
