Drugstore June

June is a twenty-something wannabe influencer juggling multiple problems: her parents want her to move out, her ex-boyfriend is accusing her of stalking him, and the police think she may be involved in the robbery of the pharmacy she works at.

Also, she has zero life skills.

Let’s just be honest… It’s extremely hard to like any of the characters in this movies, so very, very hard. Except for Davey, of course, but then, he’s played by Haley Joel Osmont, and he’s awesome, so that's easy. Other than that, most of the characters in this film are so annoying, so vacuous, so narcissistic, so unbelievably tedious and awful, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that most people simply aren’t willing to even sit through this movie.

I almost quit watching the film myself, truth be told, but that was because Bobby Lee is in it, and I fucking hate that guy. Bobby Lee is a comedian and actor, and he once told a story on a podcast about how one time in Hollywood, some assistant on set didn’t recognize him when he showed up, and sent him to go sit in the room for the extras. The assistant wasn't even mean to him about it (because he definitely would've included that part in the story), they were indifferent, probably because they were busy. So anyway, instead of correcting the situation, Bobby Lee just sat quietly in the room for the extras for a couple of hours, until the fact that he was missing became a problem on set, as it was holding everything up. He explains that he did this specifically so that the assistant would get in trouble, and probably fired, and he giggled as he revealed that the assistant "got in soooo much trouble." And as he told this little asshole anecdote on his little scumbag hipster podcast, he did it with the kind of readily apparent giddy glee that only the truly worst kind of entitled and petty little piece of shit could feel. It was obvious how proud he was as he told this story, how righteous and vindicated he felt. Worst of all, he told it as if it were super funny.

So, I fucking hate him and wish him nothing but ill.

But despite his presense… I did watch the entire film, and the thing is, the fact these characters are terrible is the whole point, because it's a film about the terrible malaise of mediocrity. I don't know if that particular subject makes for a necessarily good or entertaining film, but still, that's what it is.

So anyway, here's how it goes...

More than anything, June wants to be special. Constantly streaming the ins and outs of her life for her small online following (shoutout June Squad), her days are pretty idle and on her own time, and mostly seem to involve consuming junk food of any kind, and all while telling anyone and everyone about her commitment to health and wellness. This is just one of her many delusions, one that borders on hypochondria. During one of her many visits to her doctor, a man she treats like her personal nemesis, she pesters him for some kind of diagnosis, any diagnosis, convinced that she must be sick in some way. But whether she’s hoping to develop some kind of allergy, or hoping to be on the spectrum, or just generally hoping to be sick, coupled with her desire to be an influencer, it’s clear that all June really wants is for something that will make people acknowledge her, something that will center her, something that will create a requirement for special dispensation, for her to live an acknowledged life... to be special.

But the fact is, June is nothing but ridiculously, tediously normal, just some girl living in some suburb, doing nothing, and with no plans to change, completely stagnant and unremarkable. Despite this, she is also shockingly narcissistic, and completely lacking in self-awareness too.

In a nutshell…

She’s the worst.

June is still living at home with her parents, of course, having barely graduated from high school an undetermined amount of time ago, but it seems like a couple of years easily. Either way, she still lives in her childhood bedroom, which is sadly still draped in pampered “teen beat” accoutrements. And like the "teen beat" baby she is, she is all starry-eyed-and-pink-hearts obsessed with boys in general, and her now engaged-to-someone-else high school ex-boyfriend, Davey, specifically. She’s just not an adult in any way. She's cocooned in immaturity, a butterfly who not only has yet to break free and fly away, but one who refuses to even try. She generally doesn’t seem to want to date or party. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She just seems to wander around town, eating candy and arguing with people that she knows, all of whom are obviously tired of her, and then being the shocked victim at their implication that she is out-of-line and overly-entitled.

Her parents are especially tired of her bullshit, but... they also love and support her. Still, they perhaps indulge June a little too much, which is probably why she’s generally unemployable, and why most people can’t seem to stand her. Plus, for all her annoying bullshit, the truth is, June is kind of charming, so she coasts on that.

She's a brat, basically, and not in the good Charli XCX way.

But…

June is also lonely and lost and sad. She has nothing going on, and even fewer prospects, so unless some massive change comes along, it looks like she’ll be stuck in her childhood bedroom for the foreseeable future. And beneath her spoiled and vacuous candy-coated shell, it's clear that she is aware that this means that she’s a huge loser. This is key to seeing who June really is. She’s looking for her place in the world, but she just doesn’t know where, or even how, to start. She hasn’t been prepared for it, whether it's her parents, her school, or society in general who's failed her... she's just not ready, despite the fact she should've been years ago.

Then the Pharmacy that June “works” at gets robbed and suddenly, she has a direction. June decides that she’s gonna find who did this… mostly because she’s bored and directionless, and she has watched a lot of crime documentaries, so she knows how to run an investigation, but also because the cops naturally assume that she is behind the robbery, which she finds both upsetting and offensive.

For the rest of the film, we follow June on an odyssey through her little slice of a mediocre suburban bedroom community, not just so that she can find the person responsible for the crime and clear her name, but also perhaps for her to find a meaning to her own life.

Co-written by stand-up comedian, actor, and star Esther Povitsky, this film, and the main character of June, is very much based on her style of comedy, a kind of dryly blind deadpanned self-centeredness. As a result, Drugstore June is basically a Zoomer Big Lebowski, a coming-of-age story told during a crime story, the kind of thing where shit happens, nothing is really solved, nobody really changes, the world keeps on turning, and the influencers keep on streaming.

Drugstore June is often kind of funny, there’s a lot of really good moments, and some funny people in it. I was honestly impressed with Danielle Bregoli aka Bhad Bhabie's performance. But the film is also consistently a little “too real,” at least in the sense that these are all characters who feel like people that you might actually know, or maybe have seen or heard about, and they’re all the kind of people who you don’t want to spend any time with, if you can help it.

In the end, Drugstore June is better than you might expect, but it’s also pretty annoying throughout.

Plus, Bobby Lee sucks.