by Griffin Larson-Erf, Staff Writer
“That sucked,” says one character in Edie Arnold is a Loser, after the irrepressible Frances (McKenna Tuckett) has improvised several kindergarten-level lyrics to show him how easy writing a song is. “Yeah,” she shoots back, “but it exists.” Screenwriter Megan Rico has said that that line contains the fundamental message of the film, and I couldn’t ask for a better way to summarize it. Edie Arnold, which screened at the Apollo Theater on Oct. 1, does not “suck,” but I can hardly call it perfect: it features ham-fisted character development and a modicum of forced humor. All the same, it offers several people one can’t help but root for—both on and behind the screen.
The titular Edie Arnold (Adi Madden Cabrera) is a reluctant student at Our Lady of Undying Sadness, a Catholic school for girls, run by the ancient and unwavering Sister Myra (Star Herrmann). She is bullied by resident mean girl Kati Vidal (Alana Mei Kern) and argues with her mother, Luanne (Cherish Rodriguez). She finds respite with her friends, chief of whom is the orthodontically-headgeared Francis—and it is Francis who brings her to a local punk rock show, at which she ends up replacing a very drunk drummer (Bryson Alejandro). One thing leads to another, and soon Francis, Edie, et al., have formed a punk band (“The Nundead”). They chase opportunities while Edie seeks a romance with Walter Boyd (Lucas Van Orden), a widely-salivated-over altar boy who loads swagger into the place where normal humans keep their brains.
As per the Substack newsletter “Not That Rob Thomas,” Rico wrote the film while still in college. She had shelved it until her co-director, Kade Atwood, came knocking with a desire to make a movie without having to spend a massive amount of money. He got his wish: Edie Arnold was shot for under $100,000, over the course of 10 days, as per producer and actor Bryson Alejandro. The film’s budget equated to wages of $150/day for cast and crew—distributed, Alejandro explained, through a “favored nations” approach, in which all those who work on a film are paid the same amount.
“That’s … [an] embarrassingly small amount to pay everyone,” Alejandro says. “But because everyone was being paid the exact same amount … we got rid of the weird hierarchy, and … everyone was an equal contributor and collaborator in the art that we were creating together, which was really cool. And so because they were giving us such discounted rates, we didn’t want to take advantage of them, and so we were very strict and adamant about not going overtime.” (The only exception, Alejandro says, was a single day on which the gate of the film’s grip truck wasn’t working.)
A rougher version of Edie Arnold premiered at South by Southwest, per “Not That Rob Thomas,” and the filmmakers have taken the finished version on a tour of roughly 20 cities. That tour is the work of Alejandro, who also serves as the film’s booker, marketing it exclusively to independent theaters.
Typically, Atwood explains, “... The option is, you put it up on Amazon or Apple [TV] yourself, and then people can buy it online, and then Amazon [and] Apple take fifty percent of the cut, and it … just doesn’t feel like a fair share of the cut for the amount of work that we’ve put into this.” What’s more, Atwood said, the film’s creators “feel that streaming services contributed to this downfall of theaters and movies as a whole, and so we don’t want to contribute to that system, and so we’re kind of circumventing it and doing our own release.”
Edie Arnold’s original itinerary did not include Oberlin; as Atwood recounted in a Q&A session after the Oct. 1 screening, the team only came to the Apollo because a night happened to open up in their tou ring schedule. They were greeted, Atwood said, by the largest number of people they’ve had show up to any screening before then.
Attendees, meanwhile, were met with a film that, in numerous moments, is not so much “funny” as it is trying to be funny. There is a montage of Francis sliding various keys from a key ring into a door she is trying to unlock—a sequence that speeds up until it reaches an unpleasant, near GIF-like intensity. There are high-school-notebook-style animations (laboriously hand-drawn by Rico, as per ScreenRant) that, while amusing when applied to Edie and Francis’ mutual joking or Francis’ band posters, are either unnecessary or unevenly deployed beyond that. There is a rather implausible gag in which the Nundead’s bassist Ellen (Alexa Paige) tells Edie to “elaborate”—a word the rest of the band has never heard.
What’s more, so many of this story’s characters lack real, or reasonable, development. Edie, for one, receives half as much backstory as she deserves. Her father died three years ago, but she seems to have adjusted well, considering that that fact is almost never mentioned again. A dead father could have tied so much of her story together; it could have been he who gave Edie a love of punk rock, or he who taught her to play the drums. It could even have been his death that strains the relationship between Edie and her mother, rather than the latter being steered towards taking her daughter’s side by a single meeting with the local book club, full of catty, conformity-demanding moms whom Luanne seems never to have doubted before. While we’re at it, Rico could have hinted more at Luanne’s own rebellious teen years, at Kati’s secret insecurity, at the frustration with Sister Myra that a fellow nun mutters during a climactic disciplinary hearing.
If some of the people in this story seem flat or under-revealed, though, others make for absolute joys. Francis lives life by careening from one irreverence to another; Sister Myra hobbles hostilely through the world of 2026, hilariously ignorant of such things as how high schoolers will react to the phrase “oral sex.” And however much you enjoy individuals in this film, you like the groups even more. You laugh at the way an entire crowd of Edie’s fellow students admits unhesitatingly to being losers. You smile when Edie’s friends tease her about her raging horniness for Walter. Most of all, you grin when they start making music together… because it’s actually good. These are no low-budget-film hacks who need you to believe that others could like them, for the sake of the plot—the music they make is truly enjoyable (and impressive, considering Cabrera didn’t know how to drum before this movie, according to Collider.)
What we are left with then, is a film that is worthwhile instead of perfect. It is a story whose heartbeat is the group, the collective determination to produce something, and it is with a group—one willing to be kind to it—that it is best enjoyed. The audience around me laughed more often than I did on Oct. 1. Perhaps they understood what I did not: against all odds, this film exists, and it would be a shame not to enjoy it.
