On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: A Perfect Pick for Productive Potheads
Do you have a weed habit? How about a to-do list that’s a mile long? What about a deep-seeded fear of getting skull-fucked by your creepy roommate? If you answered yes to any of those questions, try “Smiley Face“: Gregg Araki‘s sharp left turn into stoner comedy from 2007 — starring Anna Faris, John Krasinski, Jane Lynch, Adam Brody as a Reagan-obsessed drug dealer, and so, so much more.
19 years since “Smiley Face” debuted at Sundance, Araki’s unexpected stoner classic feels less like a one-off from his ever-brilliant career and more like a perfect snapshot of what it feels like to be alive today. Marijuana is way easier to get now than it was in the mid-2000s, and the stigma around smoking weed has largely evaporated in many parts of the country. That means there are more 24-hour potheads stumbling around the United States (California, especially) than ever before.
That makes sense considering so much about daily American life has come to resemble a low-grade endurance test. Whether you’re struggling financially or existentially in 2026, just getting through a random weekday can feel like an impsosible feat, and that’s exactly what “Smiley Face” is all about.
Meet Jane (Faris), a struggling actress in Los Angeles who accidentally eats a plate full of THC-infused cupcakes — despite a million things she needs to get done and few bong rips that already made her really, really high. Fearful of what will happen if she shirks her day’s responsibilities, Jane spends the rest of the film trying to accomplish a few basic tasks… while her brain actively works against her. Paying the electric bill and making it to an audition should be simple enough. But that semi-reserved framing from screenwriter Dylan Haggerty quickly spirals into a nightmare that’s deliriously relatable and specific.
A portrait of a woman who feels much safer inside her own head than she does participating in the world around her, “Smiley Face” is classic Araki, even if the packaging looks different from his other work. Coming off the DIY, punk chaos of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (“Totally F*ed Up,” “The Doom Generation,” and “Nowhere”), Araki’s zaniest entry flirts with mainstream comedy appeal without ever betraying the director. Beneath the goofy set pieces and half-assed Marxist theory, this is still a story about disorientation, paranoia, and drifting through a version of reality that never quite locks into place.
With “Smiley Face,” the big shift wasn’t the feeling behind an Araki movie, but how that feeling was expressed. Instead of apocalyptic dread or sexual trauma, the altered state seen here is as easy as just being extremely, absurdly, painfully… what was I saying? Oh, right! High. As time stretches and minor hurdles like backing out of a parking space become full-on psychological crises, Jane pushes onward precisely because she has no other choice.
The brighter, almost sitcom-adjacent universe that Jane navigates isn’t the hostile urban sprawl of Araki’s earlier work; Jane plays far too much Zoo Tycoon for that. But it does offer the same aimless industry hustle that always been brutally specific to this city. Clever editing flourish from the filmmaker push L.A. even further out of alignment, as the disembodied voice of narrator Roscoe Lee Browne and a feverish performance by the Santa Monica Ferris wheel endlessly distorts without ever breaking.
It’s a softer film, but not a lesser one from Araki by any means. Instead, “Smiley Face” is a crucial bridge that connects the director’s early provocations with the more polished films he’d make later. It both broadened the appeal of a Gregg Araki film and reinforced his core obsessions as the rare comedy about weed that actually gets something important done.
“Smiley Face” is particularly satisfying to revisit ahead of the 4/20 holiday, which this year lands on a Monday. For a lot of people, that means the “occasion” is less a celebration than it is something to squeeze in between emails and errands. But just like Jane, those folks are just doing what they have to do to get through another fucking day. —AF
The Bite: There’s No Alarm Clock Like Anna Faris
You know, for a stoner movie, it’s astounding just how awake “Smiley Face” is. Like, right from the jump. Just the way Araki shoots Anna Faris on the Venice Beach Ferris Wheel, the zooms, the transitions, the extreme close-ups that put us into a heightened perspective that is simultaneously ridiculous, poignant, and jarring. The film language mirrors its protagonist’s altered state, what with all the arrows, inter-titles, cartoony sound effects, the Roscoe Lee Brown VO, sure, but in the doing? It uses more cinematic tools more flexibly and with greater joy than anything I see when I watch, like, “Dune.” There are fades to white instead of black because of how Jane reacts to light, because she is, as previously established, so stoned! Araki is just so fucking smart about something so dumb, and that’s beautiful, you know?
Although some of that beauty, I must admit, is the aughts of it all. Because wow. The bright, bright primary colors in this movie and the pitch-perfect bumper stickers on the cars — the curly “J” on Jane’s Volvo sedan SENT ME — are sure that the housing market is going to be fine forever. This film has an amazingly deep bench with its cast, too. Not quite the way “Scott Pilgrim” does but it’s close. I was the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme over Brian Posehn as a bus driver, let alone Jim Rash and Jane Lynch in the same scene, John Krasinski doing a Dwight mid-run on “The Office,” John Cho escaping the road to White Castle to act as a ride to Venice here. Adam Brody’s dreds are, you know, what those are, but helpfully undone by him namedropping Reaganomics (Danny Masterston’s creepy roommate, less so). It’s 2007 and nobody’s facemogging. Nobody’s crossfit. Everyone looks normal. Human.
No one more so than Faris. It’s worth noting that she does this solo, in a genre that loves duos a lot, and her commitment is incredible. She spends most of “Smiley Face” with her jaw unhinged, but it’s with such earnest, almost naive, astonishment that you can’t help but enjoy her barrel rolls to avoid the devil behind her in a parking garage, or the comparison between the union speech in her head and her political actions in real life. She goes white girl crazy in this movie, in the way that only white girls and very small puppies are allowed. And that shouldn’t be. But what a world it would be if everyone could spend a day getting stoned off their roommates’ weed cupcakes, and love lasagna/President Garfield, and buy a really comfortable bed.
The spreading of pages from “The Communist Manifesto” throughout LA — the one time we leave Jane’s point of view — doesn’t feel prescient as I’m writing this in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, let’s not take the movie that far. It’s really funny, though. So is “Smiley Face.” And I’m glad I’m seeing it now, when in 2007 your girl was painfully straight-edged and too busy trying to read “Moby Dick” and trying to watch “Solaris” than to sit on a swing set and draw shapes in the sky. Super serious Baby High School Sarah wouldn’t have appreciated it. But allegedly productive inside our capitalist hellscape Adult Sarah had a blast, man. —SS
“Smiley Face” (2007) is streaming free on Tubi.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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