Penises, Neo-Nazis, and Poe: The Latest Film to Shock Audiences at Cannes

If you want to know the tone of The Sweet East, the new film that just premiered at Cannes, here's a taste. It opens with a man swinging a condom full of semen around. Soon after that, the protagonist, Lillian (Talia Ryder), sings a beautiful original song to herself in a graffiti-filled karaoke bathroom. Then there's a pierced penis, which we see with all its many, many studs. Then there’s Simon Rex playing a white supremacist who loves Edgar Allen Poe. And there’s more to come including Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi, with a British accent, as a pompous actor.

This is all to say cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ solo feature directorial debut is wild. It’s also fascinating, a fairytale-esque journey through America that will inevitably turn some viewers off. Written by the critic Nick Pinkerton, it’s the kind of movie designed to push buttons with a little bit of a “u mad” attitude towards political correctness. It can also be very funny in its outrageousness, even if it ends on a moment that ups the provocation.

We first meet teenager Lillian when she’s on a school trip to D.C. with a bunch of other rowdy high schools. Lillian is uninterested with her cohorts. So when she gets the opportunity to run away from them with a punk (Earl Cave), because a man played by comedian Andy Milonakis enters the venue where they are partying waving around a gun and spewing Pizzagate-type conspiracy theories, she does. She tags along with Cave to Baltimore and, from there, follows his activist collective to New Jersey, with the intention of beating up Nazis. There, she meets Lawrence, a white supremacist college professor played by former MTV VJ and Red Rocket star Simon Rex.

Read more at The Daily Beast.