Were this 1995, informed parties would quite rightly be shouting writer-director Adam Leon's name from the rooftops as one of the brightest hopes for a new American cinema. Alas, the year is 2018, and things have changed. Leon's tremendously fresh 2012 debut Gimme the Loot - tagging alongside a pair of young graffiti artists as they wound their way through a New York afternoon - was modestly distributed, and too little seen; his follow-up Tramps has been folded into the rapidly expanding Netflix catalogue, which raises questions of just how emergent filmmakers are expected to get their work out there (and get it seen) at a moment where streaming services have far surpassed even glory-days Miramax in their spending power and reach.
Tramps - which might, for several reasons, bear the alternate title Got the Loot - shapes up as a crime movie with recognisable actors attached, but it's still the same kind of hangout movie Leon was making first time out, and very definitely still a New York movie. It does, however, move in appreciably different directions and circles, meandering from the inner city to its pricier suburban outer reaches, and replacing Gimme the Loot's larky misdemeanours with a shift into the realms of petty crime, with its capacity for bringing disparate souls together. Our heroes are the genial Danny (Callum Turner) and the harder-bitten Ellie (Grace Van Patten), a couple of kids paired up in the wake of a bag drop that goes awry: not a high-octane setpiece, this, rather a matter of eager-beaver Danny stepping onto a subway train a beat too soon.
What follows would be distinctive enough as the sunniest, least bloody crime movie in some time. The bag and its contents are perhaps inevitably no more than a MacGuffin, a means to a narrative end: with hours to kill before their next opportunity to hand it over, Danny and Ellie walk and talk, dodge the few authority figures headed their way, pick over their experiences, and bond in the attempt to set things right. (As the amateurish crime syndicate involved is fronted by nerdy comedian Mike Birbiglia, rather than, say, James Gandolfini, we sense they're in no immediate danger.) Were this 1995, you suspect Leon might well have been accused of riding the emergent Richard Linklater's coattails, but Linklater has proved himself such a versatile filmmaker over subsequent decades that there is surely room for a bright-eyed, attentive student to move in on his predecessor's sometime territory.
Tramps might still be considered a consolidation of what was going on in Gimme the Loot, evidently the work of someone making a similar movie with more money, and the prospect of wider distribution ahead. (It's the same process that, in the 1990s, took Robert Rodriguez from El Mariachi to Desperado and Kevin Smith from Clerks to Mallrats.) Turner (the Brit whose boyish handsomeness has carried him across the Atlantic) and Van Patten (who first registered as Adam Sandler's daughter in last year's Netflix hit The Meyerowitz Stories) are capable young actors who work well within the framework of naturalism Leon lays down - in the grand indie tradition, a lot of Tramps looks to have been shot on the hoof, requiring interactions with actual transit workers and passers-by - even if they can't quite match the uncoachable, possibly unrepeatable pop and fizz of Gimme the Loot's effervescent leads.
Still, as these two born underdogs wander towards a kind of resolution, both for the bag and themselves, the film around them emits a low-key, modest but undeniable charm. (Shot in 1.66:1 in homage to past endeavours, Tramps doesn't even deign to take up the whole of your screen if you do find yourself Netflixing it.) Towards the end of the movie, the bag's rightful owner (the terrific supporting actress Margaret Colin, seizing a moment, as ever) schools Ellie about the syndicate's plan in a few lines that strike the ear like an authorial statement, and a rebuke to the torturous mythologies of so much contemporary American cinema: "You know how some men are: the more intricate they make something, the more impressive they think it is."
Leon never stresses his plot points, preferring simply to ride around with them in his back pocket, but his careful writing and editorial nudging nevertheless succeeds in getting Danny and Ellie into a position where they're forced to make a choice between love and money, and equally the audience to a place where we hope they will make the right call. In our never more atomised, post-Weinstein landscape, it's a kick to cross paths with a filmmaker this unabashedly optimistic and romantic, and with a filmography so dedicated to cultivating and putting out good vibes, wherever and however we come to receive them. Leon might be an even more vital and valuable sensibility to have around now than he would have been twenty-odd years ago.
Tramps is available to stream via Netflix.
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