For ‘Dinner in America,’ a Surprise Theatrical Run Is Dessert

On a recent weeknight at the IFC Center in Manhattan’s West Village, staff members corralled a 400-person crowd in and out of the doors while swarms circled the lead actors of the sold-out feature playing that night: “Dinner in America.” The film — an angsty rom-com that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 but struggled to find distribution before being self-released in 2022 — has catapulted from crickets to cult status since going viral on TikTok in the past couple of months. Seizing on a rare encore, the filmmakers have rallied fans to support a shot at the theatrical run they never had.

“You don’t get second chances in this business,” the film’s writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier told the audience during a post-screening Q&A. The surprise comeback began around September when an inexplicable bump in TikTok’s algorithm turbo-blasted the movie and its earworm original song, “Watermelon.” Soon after, the film was trending across Hulu (where it is currently streaming), Letterboxd and Google. The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, Calif., was one of the first theaters to announce a screening, selling out in less than 24 hours. The nonprofit cinema said the requests for “Dinner in America” were the most they’d received for any film.

The plot follows the unlikely musical and sexual chemistry between Simon (Kyle Gallner) and Patty (Emily Skeggs). He’s an on-the-lam, slick crust punk; she’s a mousy 20-year-old whose parents keep her away from strobe lights and on five different medications. She finds refuge from bullies and suburban stupor by mailing Polaroid nudes and love poems to her favorite hardcore band’s ski-masked lead singer, who, coincidentally, is Simon.

When “Dinner in America” was released for a limited theatrical run, as well as on demand, in 2022, The New York Times gave it a mixed review. The critic Concepción de León wrote that the movie “delivers on surprise and explosiveness, but much of its offensive language, both racist and homophobic, feels gratuitous in a film that might have otherwise landed as an offbeat love story.”

But content creators have been lifting up the film. The screenwriter Nic Curcio pitched the film to his TikTok followers as the “love child of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ and Todd Solondz” after noticing the uptick beyond the usual MovieTok nerds. Those millions of viewers, he told The Times, are probably sitting alone in their rooms: “The screening elements bring this whole phenomenon full circle.” The film’s success on social media meant it wouldn’t have to wait decades to achieve an underground cachet.