If cinema thinks it has caught up with a cultural craze, then you can bet the relevant phenomenon ended sometime last week. Just remember all those kids enjoying the Swinging Sixties in Dracula AD 1972. (The clue is in the title.)
Pokémon Go may already have rendered Nerve a bit creaky, but, despite the lack of augmented reality, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's funny, cool film just about keeps its fingernails lodged in the speeding zeitgeist.
The picture imagines a mobile game that asks players to watch or participate in an escalating series of dares. Venus (Emma Roberts) is the classic high-school heroine – the good girl exemplified to the point of pastiche by Nancy in Stranger Things – and, responsible above all her peers, initially decides to only observe the chaos.
Her raucous pal Sydney (Emily Meade) is a doer who, after accepting a dare to moon during a cheerleading session, finds herself becoming one of the area’s most popular Nerve players.
The girls fall out and (you knew it had to happen) Venus signs up to play. The first challenge is to kiss a stranger in her local Staten Island bar. She spots a chap reading Virginia Wolf and, delighted to discover that he is dishy enough to be Dave Franco, Venus plunges in with eager lips. The two get sucked into further challenges involving shoplifting, tattoos, speeding motorbikes, and handguns. Before long, cash is mounting up in Venus’s account and her followers hugely outnumber Sydney’s.
Roberts is now a few years too old for the role, but this increasingly impressive actor manages the compromised naiveté effectively. Franco has a biker swagger that works perfectly for the mysterious stranger. Meade is better still as the popular kid furious at her upstaging by the school swot. A near-hip soundtrack and almost-funky visuals – avatars hang over the players at significant points – kick the film to (at least) the beginning of the current decade.
The satirical shots are taken at barn doors so wide that missing is no option. Nothing is so important as followers. The approval of strangers matters more than the adoration of family. All life is mediated through the small screen. But the pace is sufficiently furious to distract from the bluntness of the lampoon.
The film does eventually spin off into narrative absurdity. The first hour might be described as “movie-plausible” - believable when projected hugely and decorated with stars - but the barmy closing act can’t even claim that much.
This remains a zesty entertainment that may avoid seeming hopelessly dated until it arrives on DVD (if such things still exist).
