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Currently Reading Cusp Review: In a Clear-Eyed Sundance Doc, Three Small-Town Texas Teenagers Act Out Their Alienation, Partying Against Purple Skies
Aaloni, Autumn, and Brittney mostly want to party, but live with a daunting awareness of sexual violence.
Owen Gleiberman, provided by
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With: Aaloni, Autumn, Brittney.
The youth party culture, as portrayed in the mass media, tends to be driven by a certain debauched and glamorous energy: the clubbing, the drugs, the “freedom,” the your-life’s-a-soap-opera excitement that turns the rituals of hooking up into a flame that lures everyone. But in “Cusp,” a documentary about three small-town Texas teenagers wiling away the summer, the party imperative may be just as compulsive, but it’s the scaled-down, middle-of-nowhere version, where a party is a bonfire and a bunch of dudes standing around with beer and blunts and a jug of moonshine and whatever girls they can get to show up.