Will This Become a Cult Movie?

My local art house-cinema, the Watershed in Bristol, was almost full on the penultimate night of the three-day screening of a movie that required something of a blitzkrieg in subversive marketing to get a showing at all in the UK.  The start time was just after 6pm and it was Monday.  So, the size of the audience spoke volumes for the film’s draw. The distribution of Dear White People, the well-received – firstly at Sundance – movie written and directed by Justin Simien, I feel raises a number of enjoyably speculative questions.  Might it become the cult film of 2015?  I do hope so.
Reading the reviews there are comparisons with early Spike Lee, some consideration about whether or not it is too myopic in its view of campus race relations, but no one argues that the script is anything other than a very fine piece of writing.  I am so impressed with the quality of the writing that I will be nominating it for a BAFTA.  I also need to see the film again just to catch up on the repartee I missed whilst laughing too loudly at the stream of brilliant, cutting and poignant one-lines that never stopped coming.
Yet, the film is dark too, deeply so.  It takes absolutely no prisoners in its dissection of individual and collective prejudice.  I believed it too.  Yes, I was on a fictional campus but I felt I was being given access to a very important discourse within multi-cultural America that is sorely needed elsewhere in the world.  The film too delivers a love-story that is sweet, sentimental even – pure Hollywood – but I loved it.  Is it good enough, quirky enough, different enough to become a cult film?  Only time will tell.  I am reminded of a very different film which had an equally chequered history, Repo Man, written and directed by the maverick British filmmaker Alex Cox in 1984 became a cult because it was so weird and wacky.  Yet, it was also an excoriating piss-take on consumerism and entered into the canon of the punk-movie genre.  Like Dear White People it ran at full-throttle for 90-minutes, but unlike it, hasn’t been the catalyst for a serious debate on contemporary race relations, class, privilege and youthful aspiration whether sexual, political and commercial.
This is a film that will flourish through word-of-mouth. If you haven’t yet seen it and it is showing locally I urge you to support the film and spread the word. Film culture needs its cult films. They don’t come around that often. The story of its distribution in the UK is also a salutary tale in the problems for filmmakers of getting their work seen in cinemas. Thankfully a specialist distributor was found when the BFI decided in its infinite wisdom that the film didn’t warrant its support. When cinema distribution is in the total control of a handful of individuals and when different, challenging and difficult films are ignored because they are considered to be uncommercial and too risky or in this case to niche, they need to become cults if for no other reason than to shove two fingers at an increasingly out-manoeuvred system. For surely, where this film will be watched will be online. It is beautifully shot and edited and looks great on a big screen. It is also a wonderful film to watch in company. A British audience might be somewhat bemused, not get many of the jokes and feel it is politically incorrect to find the comedy funny. The place I would have loved to have seen this film would have been on some east-coast Ivy-League campus. Now, that would have been educational.