Sydney ’16: Goat review

Sydney ’16: Goat review: Nick Jonas delivers a breakthrough performance as the brother of a wannabee frat member in this intense drama from Andrew Neel.

A highly intense, almost retching insight into college frat pledging. Goat review by Paul Heath, February 2016.

If we don’t include Camp Rock, which was technically a TV movie, and the still-to-be-released Careful What You Wish For, the multi-talented, former Disney and pop superstar Nick Jonas makes his feature film debut with Goat; impressively and quietly carving himself out a niche in quality indie.

Goat is also the fictional feature debut for co-writer and director Andrew Neel, who adapts the material from Brad Land‘s real-life memoir. The story starts at a party, where hoards of teenagers are making out, causing a riot and getting blind drunk. When the cocaine comes out, Brad Land (Ben Schnetzer) decides to call it a night, leaving his older brother Brett (Jonas) to continue to party. Upon leaving, Brad is asked to give an apparent fellow party-goer, and his companion, a ride home. When he agrees, Brad finds himself being led well out of town where he is beaten to a pulp, and left to bleed in surrounding farmland.

Fast-forward a few months and Brad’s wounds have slowly healed, and he’s arrived at his college of choice for enrollment. His brother Brett is waiting, still reeling from not leaving the party with him when he was attacked, and asks Brad to pledge for his fraternity Phi Sigma Mu in an attempt to toughen him up. The elite house enforces a week of ‘pledging’, also known as ‘Hell Week’, where prospective members endure an endless series of humiliations by older students, including degradations, insults and beatings. Already being a member, Brett is involved with Brad’s constant physical and psychological torture, something that tests the brothers to breaking point.

Goat is also co-written by David Gordon Green (Our Brand Is Crisis),  the American filmmaker who cut his teeth with decent stoner comedies Pineapple Express and Your Highness, before finding a different path with recent indie fares Joe and Manglehorn. Green’s frequent collaborator James Franco produces this film, as well as appears in one extremely wild scene as one of the fraternity’s former and most respected members. His cameo impresses, and also obviously brings some Hollywood weight to the independent drama, but it is the film’s two leads in Jonas and Schnetzer who steal the limelight as the warring brothers who both have a point to prove.

Schetzer, who was one of the stand-outs in the British film Pride a couple of years ago, continues on his journey to becoming one of the acting world’s most promising rising stars. In Goat, he devours every scene he’s in, feasting on the material and transforming into the tortured soul that is Brad Land. Jonas firmly supports in this breakthrough role, channeling echoes of a younger Mark Wahlberg as the beefy, though brainy older sibling who wants the best for his brother. His performance as the swearing, beer swigging Brett is a career stand-out and a million miles away from his Disney days and his squeaky-clean boy band image, which we guess is his intention.

Neel directs with gusto and creates a highly intense, almost retching insight into college life which could have derailed and entered the realms of gross-out garbage at any moment, had it not have been told with such gritty realism. After all, this is all based on fact.

Goat is an intense, though unconventional rollercoaster ride, certainly not for the squeamish; an effecting, fly-on-the-wall thoroughbred, that is also one of the best independent films of the year so far.

Goat is currently playing at the Sydney Film Festival.

Following its recent screening success at Sundance London, those of you in New York can catch Goat at BAMcinemaFest on the 18th June 2016.