Drunkboat

"Drunkboat" might have come off via nothing more than acting ability and a good heart, if the dialogue didn't amount mostly to aimless chit-chat.

The burnished smear of Lisa Rinzler's photography is a plus, but "Drunkboat" is ultimately the kind of pet project that never traverses from personal to powerful.

Though studied and grating at times, "Drunkboat" does sustain a distinct, odd tone. Like its characters it's dreamily restless and prey to its own quixotic ideas.

This enigmatic coming-of-age movie often seems destined to sail off the deep end. Yet it rights itself just often enough to keep you watching.

[An] incoherent drama.

A passion project ill suited to cinematic adaptation, or at least sludgy, unresolved, mannered and grating in its realized incarnation.

... feels like an intimate, idiosyncratic acting workshop that might have worked better on stage.

Undercooked, lazy and frustratingly underwhelming despite solid performances.

Drunkboat is a "small" movie that plays like a mawkish, Friedberg/Seltzer riff on a small movie.

Horribly written, shockingly amateur. Contrived and exhausting don't begin to summarize this inert disaster.

In the end, "Drunkboat" is no "Glengarry Glen Ross" or "American Buffalo," and even if it were, the real Mamet has always worked better onstage than on film.

Held up from release for years, probably because nobody knew what to make of it, the film deserves a look, and Meyer is a talent worth watching.