Marin Kanter

(On Cable TV, May 2022) The best reasons to watch The Loveless today are that it’s the debut of (co-)director Kathryn Bigelow, and that it features a very young Willem Dafoe in a lead role as a biker terrorizing a small town near Daytona. Otherwise, the film is a deconstructive 1980s look at the 1950s, with the bikers not quite being terrors and the upstanding citizens not necessarily being so upstanding. The ending is not bad, in a rather glum way, but it does take a long time to get there: Stuck in small-town America with nowhere to go, The Loveless feels longer than its 85-minute running time. Dafoe makes an impression, though, and so does Marin Kanter as the complex female lead. The sense-of-place is middling at best – this is a low-budget film, after all, and whatever couldn’t be covered through period cars and timeless vistas of small-town America exceeded the production design envelope. The result isn’t too far away from downbeat New Hollywood — Fans of outlaw films may appreciate the slightly different spin eventually provided to the film, but no one will be blamed for not being that enthusiastic about the result.