Martin talks about his screenplay while the camera studies how uncomfortable he is discussing it. At a restaurant full of people fluent in the language of creative importance, David Schwimmer makes this successful television writer look painfully unqualified to explain himself. His face supplies the insecurity that his professional grievances try to conceal. He wants to direct a film drawn from his childhood, after years working on a body-swap sitcom. Before we hear much about that cherished project, we can see how badly he needs it to justify the life around it.
Jack Begert, directing his first feature from a script co-written with Dani Goffstein, soon makes that insecurity spill across the screen. Animation, manipulated imagery and rapid cuts interrupt Martin’s world, giving intrusive thoughts the power to interrupt ours. This is subjective filmmaking: the picture takes on the qualities of a character’s perception. The useful distinction here is that we experience his inability to settle. Editor Jake Torchin’s accelerated succession of images gives even moments outside a confrontation the pressure of an argument Martin cannot stop having.
I enjoyed the invention in these passages, particularly the willingness to let a troubled mind produce an untidy film. Yet Junk keeps explaining an experience its images have already communicated. Martin’s narration repeatedly inventories his dissatisfaction, while his fantasies about a woman in a barn give his longing another elaborate outlet. The visual interruptions initially make his thoughts unpredictable; the complaints gradually become easy to anticipate. Schwimmer’s quieter discomfort is often the richer material. His uncertainty allows a little space between the man and his account of himself.
The film’s boldest joke turns a financing condition into a change of actor. Executives want the protagonist of Martin’s personal screenplay rewritten as a woman, and Gaby Hoffmann temporarily replaces Schwimmer as Martin. Hoffmann retains the character’s mannerisms and resentments, making the continuity immediately readable. You can understand the experiment without any explanation of its mechanics: a supposedly transformative creative decision has left the underlying person intact. It is a playful way to question the industry’s habit of treating identity as an adjustment that can be made independently of everything else in a story.
What follows gives the joke less room to grow. Once Hoffmann has established the persistence of Martin’s personality, the substitution has largely delivered its insight. The surrounding satire suffers from a related problem. Executives who dismiss another troubled white male protagonist express their calculations so bluntly that Martin scarcely needs to expose them.
His own entitlement receives scrutiny, especially when Jena Malone’s beleaguered fiancée confronts his self-absorption, but he gets extensive opportunities to plead his case against opponents constructed for easy dismissal. The film catches the hypocrisy in the room, then stays to hear several additional explanations of it.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles, AJ and Karla have immediate difficulties that resist this much self-analysis. Played by Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder, the young friends lose their car and possessions after a robbery goes wrong. Their attempts to recover what they need carry them through parties, drug transactions and encounters with people whose helpfulness is never dependable.
AJ has a plan to bring an LA-style taco business to New York, with his preparations stored in a missing backpack. That detail gives the search an appealingly awkward mixture of desperation and enterprise. His paperwork belongs to a possible future; his present keeps making it difficult to retrieve.
Begert changes how he asks us to watch these characters. With fewer intrusive cutaways, attention can settle on their conversations and on Fike and Ryder sharing a scene. Their dependency remains entangled with familiar social behavior: making plans, bending the truth, following a friend into another questionable situation.
Fike gives AJ’s optimism enough conviction to make his evasions frustrating rather than merely slippery. Ryder lets Karla’s vulnerability coexist with her drift toward the next opportunity to score. Neither performance treats every interaction as an announcement of addiction, which makes its influence harder to dismiss as something confined to the moments of drug use.
The quieter approach still leaves room for comic absurdity. A Chihuahua passed between people during the upheaval of the robbery acquires a buoyant soundtrack in Caroline Polachek’s “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The song makes the scramble briefly feel almost manageable, allowing pleasure into a chain of bad decisions. A party featuring a pig race extends that sense of a night capable of producing anything.
The encounter with Karl Glusman’s dealer is less comfortably integrated. His stark apartment and anxious protection of a snow globe, threatened by Sante Bentivoglio’s volatile Greg, concentrate the scene around an eccentricity so insistently ominous that the people begin to feel arranged for our alarm.
Moving back toward Martin creates a larger interruption. Junk establishes AJ and Karla early enough for their precarious companionship to take hold, then returns us to a writer whose fantasies and resentments are already familiar. The difficulty is the amount of new understanding that return supplies. Each renewed immersion in Martin’s mental spectacle takes time away from a relationship still developing through shared trouble. The contrast between styles remains clear, but clarity of design cannot supply the missing accumulation of behavior.
Addiction connects these lives without making their circumstances interchangeable. Martin has prescriptions, professional standing and access to people paid to hear him; AJ and Karla spend their night trying to regain possessions and find drugs. Medication itself explains neither Martin’s selfishness nor the younger characters’ relative tenderness. Their conduct supplies those distinctions.
More revealing is the distance between Martin’s autobiographical film and AJ’s business proposal: both want permission to imagine another life, though one can command a restaurant’s attention while the other struggles to recover his documents. AJ’s plans give the backpack a value nobody stealing it would recognize. Following him and Karla through the night, we can care about that practical loss while remaining uncertain how far their friendship can help them change the habits that keep putting a future out of reach.
Junk premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 under the title Little Death before debuting globally on MUBI on October 23, 2026. Directed by Jack Begert in his feature debut and produced by Darren Aronofsky, this dark comedy-drama follows a frustrated, pill-addled TV screenwriter whose life unexpectedly intersects with two young drifters searching for a stolen car across Los Angeles.
Full Credits
Title: Junk (originally titled Little Death)
Distributor: MUBI, AC Films, Protozoa Pictures, Psycho Films
Release date: January 19, 2024 (Sundance Film Festival), October 23, 2026 (MUBI streaming)
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes (110 minutes)
Director: Jack Begert
Writers: Jack Begert, Dani Goffstein
Producers and Executive Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Andy Cohen, Dylan Golden, Brendan Naylor, Sam Canter, Noor Alfallah
Cast: David Schwimmer, Gaby Hoffmann, Dominic Fike, Talia Ryder, Jena Malone, Sante Bentivoglio, Karl Glusman, Chase Sui Wonders
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Christopher Ripley
Editors: Jake Torchin
The Review
Junk
Junk finds expressive ways to put anxiety on screen, then talks past what its images have already told us. I admired Begert’s visual curiosity and the ease between Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder, whose friendship gives the film its strongest emotional footing. The blunt Hollywood satire and disruptive returns to Martin keep that connection from developing fully. There’s talent in the shifting styles, but the shifts too often interrupt the people worth watching.
PROS
- Inventive editing and animation convey Martin’s restless mind.
- Fike and Ryder make the central friendship persuasive.
- Schwimmer finds vulnerability beneath Martin’s grievances.
CONS
- Narration repeats what the imagery establishes.
- Hollywood satire relies on blunt caricatures.
- Returns to Martin interrupt the younger characters’ development.
