Boys Go to Jupiter
by Matt Weiner
There’s not a lot that makes logical sense in the off-season and off-kilter beach town of Boys Go to Jupiter. But there’s a visceral and of-the-moment emotional reality that washes over the town’s inhabitants in the weirdly funny, sometimes haunting and genuinely moving world cooked up in animator Julian Glander’s feature film debut.
Math genius and high school dropout Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) has been cobbling together whatever work he can find to save up enough money to get his own apartment. When he discovers a payment glitch in food delivery app Grubster, he takes on as many gig deliveries as he can handle in a mad dash to save up what he needs to cash out.
These deliveries take him all over his suburban town during the winter months, when tourists are gone and the local economy that powers everyone through the boom months can run on a simmer. That is, a mostly quiet town except for Dolphin Groves, the foreboding juice conglomerate run by the mysterious Dr. Dolphin (Janeane Garofalo).
A chance food drop-off to Dr. Dolphin’s daughter Rozebud (Miya Folick) suddenly equips Billy with the political language to articulate his social and economic ennui. (That Rozebud can hold her radical views while also being heir to the Dolphin Groves fortune is not lost on Billy, even though the difference in their relative safety nets is mostly ignored by the oblivious Rozebud.) This is also when Billy notices he has picked up a hitchhiker in his Grubster bag in the form of Donut, a… well, doughnut-shaped creature that has bonded with Billy as a father figure and protector.
Billy’s awakening is also where the film’s loose “day-in-the-life” snapshots cohere into a more pointed—and subversive—tale from Glander. The bubbly 3D animation belies the pitch-black observations and asides from the town’s residents. It never gets old hearing Glander’s sharp social critiques come from the mouths of his demented, underemployed Playmobil figures come to life.
And it’s not all treatises and lectures. Boys Go to Jupiter exists comfortably in a world where alien slugs reflect on how hard it is to be a single parent and major events become impromptu musical numbers with lyrics like “Spaghetti meal has captured my heart.” It’s weirdness as an act of resistance, and by the end of the film it only feels like a slightly heightened reality compared to our own hyper-capitalist nightmare. Have a grubby day, indeed.
