It is almost certainly not an accident that the first stop in The Sweet East, a hallucinatory road-trip movie that ambles up America's eastern seaboard, is in Washington, D.C.
The movie seems to want to locate the soul of America, its normal-person political or cultural center, but instead finds only cultish, wackadoodle oddities seeking to serve obscure agendas. It's a phantasmagorical tour of a fractured America's weird fringes.
