What's the first thing an aspiring young thespian says after graduating from drama school?
"Do you want fries with that?"
Yes, it's the thankless, low-rent life of the wannabe luvvie. A threadbare existence where the vain hope of just one successful audition for Holby City can send the pulse into overdrive.
Writer-director Scott Coffey has bumped up his well-regarded short about a flailing actress to feature length and still manages to engage the services of Naomi Watts, now more familiar as King Kong's Anne Darrow.
Boasting a budget that would just about pay for the sandwiches on the set of Superman Returns, his compelling lid-lifter on the vast pool of desperate labour swirling around Hollywood is shot on the sort of camera you could get at Dixons.
Every actress has been Ellie Parker (Watts). At least, for a little while.
She's the ambitious drama student so desperate to get into the movies that she'll cheerfully prostitute her talent in front of an uncaring line of stoned producers.
While driving for one audition for a hopeless Gothic soap opera, she can switch clothes (and accent) for her next run-out as a hooker in a soft-core skinflick.
Life is a numbing succession of hopes raised and then brutally dashed as the phrase "don't call us, we'll call you" is mechanically wheeled out so much it becomes a mantra in negative.
You suspect that Coffey's unvarnished vision of a world driven by false hope and battered by permanent rejection is an authentic one.
Watts - who shot this while working on The Ring 2 - gives the sort of performance that would normally be exalted as brave but, of course, it's nothing of the sort.
What it is is expertly observed and performed free of ego (you couldn't see Catherine Zeta-Jones in the role) and ably supported by Chevy Chase as a dodgy agent and Mark Pellegrino as her berk of a boyfriend.
Ultimately, you get the impression Ellie is a loser both in life and career - one conquests admits to her post-coitally that during sex he was fantasising that she was Johnny Depp.
Tim Evans
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