Directed by Paul Sattler
Written by Steve Waverly
Starring Ben Platt, Lola Kirke, and Yvette Nicole Brown
MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and a crude gesture
Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
In theaters July 23

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Do you ever really want a movie to work but you get ten minutes in and know it isn’t going to happen? Despite being well intentioned and featuring two excellent young lead actors in Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, Netflix’s The Politician) and Lola Kirke (Mozart in the Jungle, Mistress America), Broken Diamonds is an uncomfortable slog of a movie.

Platt stars as Scott, an aspiring writer whose plans to move to Paris to start a career as a novelist are derailed when his father dies and he is temporarily put in charge of his schizophrenic sister Cindy (Kirke). The core elements of this story can work, and Platt and Kirke do an admirable job capturing the absolutely exhausting relationship between Scott and Cindy, but the script is so rough that it was shocking to find out it was based on screenwriter Steve Waverly’s real life experiences taking care of his sister who suffers from schizophrenia. The end result is a mawkish look at the way mental health affects families.

The main problem here is that this is a story that needs to be told, and watching a golden opportunity to make a film that matters is brutal. Everything in this script feels designed to create anxiety and stress, and while I am sure that is a big part of having a family member suffering from schizophrenia, if you’re going to ask an audience to spend 90 minutes in that headspace you better make sure your art is good. When a screenplay has characters make ridiculous decision after ridiculous decision and conflict is manufactured for the sake of conflict, it doesn’t matter if the thing is based on reality or not because it is going to feel phony.

I’m fine with a movie being detached from reality, but when a movie’s whole angle is realism my brain just can’t compute. Would a long term mental health facility really throw a schizophrenic out on the street? Where’s the social worker? Does it make sense to try to get your schizophrenic sister a job at your place of employment and try to hide the fact that she is schizophrenic from your employer, especially when it is obvious to everyone that this woman is clearly unequipped to hold a job? When Scott’s friend compares him to Hemingway since he is moving to Paris and Scott tells him not to because Hemingway blew his brains out, and his friend says he has to google that to verify, what planet am I living on? How would you know that Hemingway lived in Paris but not know he blew his brains out? Ok that last one is a nitpick with some bad dialogue but it is a prime example of how logic works in this movie, which is not at all.

There’s no pleasure in slagging a little indie movie like this one. Everyone is doing honest work here, but if the story you are telling is broken there isn’t a lot that can be done. Ideally Waverly would have worked out the story based on his experiences with a better screenwriter and that screenwriter could have turned in a script that made sense, but enough people read this and said “this is fine” and now we are stuck with this frustrating mess.