How to Talk to Girls at Parties review – Nicole Kidman goes peroxide punk in messy sci-fi caper

It’s 1977. Punk-rock lands on humdrum Croydon like some alien invasion, contaminating the kids and spooking the mutton-chopped oldies who are all busy gearing up for the Queen’s jubilee. It’s in the school and out on the estates. It’s upstairs in the bedroom, spinning records on a turntable. And yet, in Croydon at least, the arrival of punk appears to have coincided with a still-more dangerous visitation – that of a cult of intergalactic space-cannibals. In the darkness of the basement gig it’s hard to tell which tribe is which.

This, in a nutshell, is the intriguing-enough premise of John Cameron Mitchell’s How to Talk to Girls at Parties, freely adapted from a Neil Gaiman short story. Or rather, it’s the premise right until the moment it’s not, when Cameron Mitchell decides to adopt another premise, and then another after that. What an extravagantly muddled, borderline incontinent film this is. You might call it genre-hopping, except that this would imply some degree of intent and control. More likely it’s genre-slipping, genre-skidding; sometimes endearing but never knowingly coherent. Ah well. If you only see one gritty punk-rock coming-of-age sci-fi kids fantasy caper in this lifetime, maybe double-check the listings before you alight on this one.

Our hero is the gawky Enn (Alex Sharp), spiky-haired, with his tie loosely knotted, who blunders onto the alien base, mistaking it for a cool house party. Inside he meets the dreamy Zan (Elle Fanning), who’s grown weary of living at one-remove from British culture. Zan longs to become more of a traveller and less of a tourist. She asks, “How do I further access the punk?” Enn, for his part, is more than happy to show her.

It’s 1977. But is it really? This particular 1977 looks as though it’s been energetically brainstormed by a committee of idiots. So, OK, you’ve got punk and silver jubilee street parties and the TV test-card of the little girl playing noughts and crosses. Now how about an argument over whether the Clash have sold out by signing to CBS? Maybe an angry old man throwing a space-hopper at a child? What else? That’s it? In which case, we’ll suddenly junk all the 1970s bunting and lean hard on the sci-fi angle, with a few hallucinatory interludes and some alien body-horror. And now all at once the kids are preparing to storm the alien base. Their leader, naturally, is Boadicea (Nicole Kidman, trying hard), a peroxide, attitudinal punk designer. She looks like Toyah Wilcox and she sounds like Dick Van Dyke.

Are the film’s aliens meant to represent a reactionary older generation, bent on stifling dissent and eating its own young? Or are they maybe intended as a wry joke about how teenage boys are wont to view girls as a whole other species? Who can say? The director’s lost and his panic is contagious. Cameron Mitchell is a fine, puckish talent. He’s the man behind Shortbus, Rabbit Hole and the excellent Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But punk-era Croydon is not his natural habitat, no more than it is for the ETs he brings with him. So he turns in dizzy circles; a tourist not a traveller.