Egghead & Twinkie

What do you do when you’ve finally summoned up the courage to make a move on the girl you’ve been smitten with ever since you were a small child, and she turns you down? It’s not just her sexuality, she says – she might be bisexual, for all she knows – she’s just not attracted to you. In many a teen film, this would be cause for bitterness, resentment, even revenge. In Sarah Kambe Holland’s wonderfully modern, mature road movie, which screened at 2023’s BFI Flare, there’s a recognition that love remains a force even if it’s unrequited, and that love between friends is valuable in its own right.

Egghead (Louis Tomeo) and Twinkie (Sabrina Jie-A-Fa) have been best friends since first grade, with a shared love of slushies, pretzels, anime and riding their bikes. They go to school together and they work for the same company, holding promotional signs by the side of the road – Egghead is the one always required to dress up as a smiling sun. They’ve both acquired their names by taking ownership of insults (he’s smart and dorky, she has Chinese ancestry but has been raised by white conservative parents). She wants to be an animator someday. He drives her everywhere. They both know that he’s being exploited, though she seems pretty good at pushing it out of her mind, but somehow it’s not a big deal, for either of them, compared with the fun of being together.

As they reach the end of their final school year and face separation at different colleges, Twinkie is dealing with an additional crisis. In turning down Egghead, she has voiced directly, for the first time, the probability that she’s a lesbian. Going back into the closet is not something she can face, especially as BD, the girl whom she’s been smitten with for weeks and is constantly texting, has just said the word ‘I love you.’ Though her parents are shocked, they’re not immediately hostile. Any adult can see that they just need a little time, but that’s not how it feels to Twinkie. Then BD tells her about LezDance, a big lesbian event scheduled to happen in Texas, so she decides to ‘borrow’ her dad’s car and talk Egghead into driving her across several states (under false pretences) to meet the girl whom she has convinced herself is the love of her life.

Opening with animation and a collage of photographs, this film makes use of enriched imagery throughout, with text messages appearing in various forms, explanatory notes scribbled on the screen, and more. It’s an approach which connects well with the hybrid world in which today’s young people live, and it’s complemented by a great script with dialogue which manages to be natural and witty and up to date all at the same time. Of course, the problem with this is that it always makes a film age faster, but Egghead & Twinkie has enough charm to get away with that, and you don’t need to be part of that generation to relate to its characters.

The film also avoids patronising those characters. They’re both naïve about some things – Twinkie especially – but they’re not stupid, and where necessary they’re willing to put in the work to figure things out. The bond they have feels real and lived-in, their conversations full of the shorthand which develops over time between people who share almost everything. Twinkie’s minority experience of race and sexuality means there are some things which Egghead just can’t get, but because they’re both committed to the friendship, they find ways of working around that. Similarly, when the term ‘friendzone’ comes into play, it’s used positively, because for all that she takes advantage of him, Egghead is quite willing to adjust to their new reality. He knows that she does what she does out of need, and he enjoys seeing her happy, because that’s what love is.

On the road, of course, the two have some adventures, given an extra charge by the fact that they’re learning about the wider world for the first time. Nothing goes quite the way that they expect, and there are some difficult emotional moments, but they’re both growing as people and discovering that life offers more possibilities than they expected. Refusing to be restricted by genre tradition, this is a film which invites viewers to expand their horizons as well, and there’s an inherent joyfulness to it which makes it a pleasure to watch.