David Schwimmer leads a cast of drifters and addicts in Jack Begert's directorial debut, previously savaged at Sundance as Little Death.
Mubi has dropped the full trailer for Junk, a Los Angeles slacker comedy that arrives streaming on October 23 carrying the baggage of a rough festival debut two years ago.
The film is not new. It premiered at Sundance in 2024 under the title Little Death and, according to FirstShowing.net, walked away with some of the harshest reviews of that festival year. The rename to Junk looks like an attempt to shake that reputation off before a fresh audience gets to it.
Jack Begert directs, making the jump from music videos and shorts to his first feature. He co-wrote the script with Dani Goffstein. The producing credits are where things get interesting: Darren Aronofsky's name sits alongside Andy Cohen, Dylan Golden, Brendan Naylor, Sam Canter and Noor Alfallah.
The cast is a strange, fun mix. David Schwimmer plays a middle-aged screenwriter stuck on a project and drowning in his own bitterness, described in the official synopsis as pill-addled and stalled on writer's block. Running parallel through the same night is a pair of young drifters, played by Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder, chasing down a stolen car and a lost dog across town. Jena Malone and Gaby Hoffmann round out the ensemble.
The trailer opens on a line that sets the tone for the whole thing: "When we were young, we used to go to double features! Now, these drug-addled Gen-Zers can't even sit through one whole film." It's bitter, it's a little mean, and it's clearly meant to be funny rather than sincere. Mubi is pitching the film as scrappy, gritty and darkly funny, built around two generations stuck somewhere between apathy and the search for something that means anything at all.
What's genuinely odd about this release is the gap between the Sundance reception and what's happening now. A film that got torn apart by critics in January 2024 doesn't usually get a polished trailer rollout and a definite streaming date almost three years later. Studios tend to bury those. Mubi is doing the opposite, leaning into the title change and betting that enough has changed, or that enough people missed the original coverage, for Junk to find its audience fresh.
For Indian subscribers, Mubi's slate has increasingly leaned into exactly this kind of festival-adjacent, hard-to-classify indie, the sort of film that wouldn't get a theatrical release here but fits comfortably into a streaming catalogue built around discovery. Whether Junk earns a second look or confirms the Sundance verdict will depend entirely on who actually presses play on October 23.
No word yet on whether Begert or any of the cast will do press around the India-facing rollout, or if Mubi plans any festival reruns before the streaming date.
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