Okie
Directed by Kate Cobb
Written by Kevin Bigley
Starring Scott Michael Foster, Kate Cobb, and Kevin Bigley
Unrated
Runtime: 83 minutes
Available digitally November 8

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

“Do my friends hate me, or do I just need to go to sleep?”

That line from John Mulaney’s 2018 standup special Kid Gorgeous bounced around my brain throughout Okie, Kate Cobb’s taut, stressful directorial debut. It’s a moody, uneasy eighty-three minutes about what happens when you try to come home after talking a bunch of shit about everyone there.

Okie centers around Louie Mulgrin (Scott Michael Foster), a novelist who made his name and his money on stories from his hometown. He lives in the city now, and drives a Tesla, and has a high-strung fiancee named Bridgette who does PR. After his father’s death, he makes the drive home to collect some personal items running into his old friend Travis (Kevin Bigley, who also wrote the screenplay). Their first encounter is awkward; two people who don’t really know each other anymore cautiously figuring out how to have a conversation. But Travis is as quick to welcome Louie back into the fold as he is to make fun of his car, and the two seem to pick up where they left off, adding Lainey (director Kate Cobb) and a gaggle of other locals along the way. When car troubles extend his planned one-day trip, Louie tags along to parties and fairs, letting himself get caught up in the past. 

They all call him “Lucky” Louie because he got out of their hometown and made something of himself. Even the most successful members of their graduating class refer to him that way. It doesn’t take long for the nickname to start sounding sarcastic. As Louie spends more time in town, reconnecting with more old friends and participating in old activities, his feelings of unease grow. Everyone in town seems to have either read Louie’s books or heard about their content, and heard that Louie took stories from others and repackaged them, exaggerating everyone’s worst qualities and even his own childhood trauma. He finds himself awkwardly explaining and defending his choices to multiple people, most of whom make their accusations with a smirk, assuring him they’re just messing with him. Are these people still his friends? Do they even like him? What, if anything, does he owe them now?

Cobb and Bigley do a nice job balancing tense drama with dark comedy, both in the screenplay and in Cobb’s choices as director. Nothing in Okie seeks to reinvent the wheel, but it looks nice, and the occasional flourishes punch up the cinematography. But while many filmgoers appreciate a breezy runtime these days, the film could have benefitted from a little more room to breathe. I was left wanting to know more about the past and the characters’ relationships, and more about Louie’s mental health, which is alluded throughout the film to but never fully explored. Scott Michael Foster plays Louie with an above-it-all tone that’s served him well in other projects, in particular Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. He’s not especially sympathetic or likable here, but he’s compelling to watch. Cobb and Bigley both do nice work as Lainey and Travis, respectively. Bigley especially shines as he masks Travis’s resentment with an unsettling smile.      

Okie is a movie about leaving and coming back. It’s about our hometowns and why we leave them, and what happens when we’re gone too long to fit in again. In a moment of wistfulness, Lainey wishes for “A national holiday where you get to walk around the house you grew up in,” just to see how it had changed and how your memories hold up. She knows as well as anyone else that going back is never what you want it to be. And when we leave, how much should we take with us? How does it translate, out in the rest of the world? The small town in Okie is surely like a million other small towns. And like all those other small towns, its lifers feel the same mixture of affection, resentment, and defensiveness. We can make fun of our shitty town to each other, but you can’t go out and make fun of it elsewhere. Locals only.