Timothée Chalamet’s usual aesthetic is best described, I believe, as “delicate ghost boy”. Or, perhaps, “sickly boy”. Or perhaps even “a frail and forelock prince”. It’s an aesthetic that is well suited to Chalamet’s more famous roles as educated youngsters Call me by your name, Little Women, e Danube.
Enter Writer / Director Adam McKay. McKay decided to take Chalamet’s sensitive kid aesthetic and tuck it into a camouflage-backed trucker hat. Why in the new comedy Don’t look up—Which is now streaming on Netflix — Chalamet doesn’t play a polite young man at all. Long-haired dirty dirt plays.
Chalamet does not show up in Don’t look up until almost 90 minutes into the film. But when it does, it’s worth it. Here’s how it goes: Jennifer Lawrence’s character, an astronomy student named Kate, has done everything in her power to inform the public that a giant asteroid is heading towards Earth and will destroy life as we know it. She was mocked, meme’d and threatened, and now, on top of everything, the government has silenced her by force. Defeated, Kate returns to her childhood hometown in rural Michigan and surrenders.
Kate gets a job in a grocery store and, don’t you know, Timothée Chalamet and his terrible friends show up in that same grocery store to steal some alcohol. The character of Chalamet, whose name is hilariously “Yule”, has greasy and unkempt hair behind his shoulders. Cover that hair with a backward camouflage baseball cap. He’s wearing a green military jacket, and while it’s not explicitly stated, I’m willing to bet that he and his family have more firearms. When he recognizes Kate from her disastrous talk show appearance, she pulls out her phone to FaceTime film her with her shit mates. In other words, it sucks.
But when Kate doesn’t care that Yule and her friends are stealing from the shop, Yule is intrigued. They end up hooking up. From Kate’s point of view, the world is ending, so why the hell not? Turns out Yule has some interesting layers. He believes in God, but is embarrassed by this fact. As the end of days approaches, he asks for permission to be vulnerable in Leonardo DiCaprio’s car. He ends up being a little more emotionally intelligent than your average f-ckboy; more like the Timothée Chalamet we know and love.
It must be said, of course, that Lady Bird Chalamet walked so that Don’t look up Chalamet could run. Before any of us knew Chalamet as a household name, Greta Gerwig saw his potential as a pooper. It made him the kind of cryptic artistic teen, too cool for school lying to girls about whether he is a virgin or not. McKay just took that foundation – Kyle hanging out in parking lots and believing the government is controlling people with cell phones – and built on it. We can only imagine where the Chalamet saga might take us.
