‘Pop Pop’ Dives Into Radicalization and Male Fragility in the Digital Age. Its Creator Says It’s “More Topical Every Day” – and Urges Us to Join Hands.

U.S. filmmaker Dylan Stephen Levers’ (this is a film about tom and maddy) debut feature, Pop Pop, is a cinematic parable that hits us not only with unusual and memorable visuals and sounds, but also hits us hard with all sorts of queasiness-inducing questions for our age of virality, digital nihilism, the manosphere and radicalization.

In true independent spirit and pop art fashion, the movie is a cinematic mash-up of meme culture, trips into cyberspace and alt-right protests that explores toxic masculinity, cancel culture and a sea of identity crises without any apparent lifeboats.

Pop Pop gets its world premiere on Sunday during the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. And it only seems fitting that it debuts in the fest’s Rebels With a Cause Competition program.

Written and directed by Levers, Pop Pop stars Cashton Tate Rehklau, Trevor Jonathan Lown and Lena Kutscher, along with Austin Davis, Djuna Knight, Kevin Confoy and Marta Kotzien. Rehklau and Lown are Dustin and Dibz, best friends who survived their senior year of college and now share an apartment in New York and an Internet series. But where do they go from here? Well, they end up taking very different paths.

Dustin becomes immersed in an increasingly radical worldview, focusing on attracting attention and a following via provocative online posts. Dibz finds meaning in social justice activism and his first crush on a man, forcing him to reconsider his identity. The film mixes fictional scenes with footage shot during real-life protests and psychedelic animations that take the audience into the digital world, including the manosphere.

Pop Pop is a Body by Lulz Films production, co-produced by Grease NYC. The cinematographer is Consuelo Althouse, while Josh Coll handled editing. W. Ian Ross, Levers and Althouse produced Pop Pop, with Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Josh Bierne-Golden and Erin Magill serving as executive producers.

In a director’s statement, Levers says he began writing Pop Pop in 2016, “as angry white men were gathering online, sharing extremist ideas about immigrants, Islam, women, and the supposed destruction of the ‘white race.’ What the media dismissed as a fringe movement soon became a significant political force.”

Watch a teaser trailer for Pop Pop here.

The filmmaker decided to explore what it means to be a man today. Ahead of its world premiere, Levers talked to THR about Pop Pop, his inspirations and hopes for the film, and how the U.S., and the world, may be able to be less divided – or at least divided with less rage.

When and how did the inspiration to create Pop Pop hit you?

I started writing this many, many years ago. The coming-of-age tale is evergreen in film and TV. Especially in the U.S., there were things coming out like Girls and Frances Ha that so many of my friends were really identifying with because they talked very eloquently about young womanhood and graduating from being a girl to an adult. But I thought, “Well, where’s the conversation around men?”

I started convening groups of people for little sessions and just writing things here and there. I come from a theater background, so this was developed like a new play. We would get together every six months with a group of actors and just hammer away at the script and make it better and better. In February of 2020, it felt ready to go. And three weeks later, there was COVID, and the world shut down.

So, what did you do?

It felt a little dead on arrival. But throughout that summer of 2020, a lot of the things that were already present as narrative came to the forefront even more. The film is set in the middle of the 2016 election cycle, but issues around masculinity, what it means to be a man, what it means to be in community with other people, whether that’s digital or otherwise, almost felt like they were on steroids now. It’s become, strangely, more and more topical every day.

Since you mentioned the election that first made Donald Trump U.S. President, I want to ask you about political marches that we see in Pop Pop. It looks like you actually shot during real protests…did you?

I had done all this research in 2019 about these alt-right protests, and I had been to a bunch of them. Famously, there was one in the Boston area called the “Straight Pride” protest, and the parade marshal was Milo Yiannopoulos. It felt very fringe and very contained, but if you were there, you felt, “Oh my god, we can’t turn away. This is just going to get bigger and bigger.”

And the filmmaker part of me felt it just saw such amazing production value in this horrible protest. So, how do we recreate that on screen? And our cinematographer, Consuelo Althouse, because she’s a genius and has an amazing background in doc filmmaking, said one of the things that we could do was shoot in some of these protests. So we did.

[A consultant on the political things on the film] told us that the protest that we really should be going to was in D.C., which was a “Stop the Steal” protest led by this guy Ali Alexander. It ended up being in December of 2020, three weeks before Jan. 6. And so it ultimately functioned as the dress rehearsal for Jan. 6. And as we were watching the news that day, we were like, “Oh my God, that guy’s in our footage! That guy’s in the footage! And that guy!”

How did you approach or think about filming inside those protests, especially sending in your actor who plays Dibz?

Consuelo and I had a lot of conversations about the ethics of shooting in an event that had its own purpose and was not being staged for the purpose of being on screen. We made a pact to take this one character, Dibz, and let the action unfold around him. We were not going to try to affect any part of the proceedings of that day, but let’s try to see if we can really catch those colors, those textures, the craziness of the day, which, even if we had millions of dollars for production design, would not have looked as authentic as what you see on screen

Trevor, who plays Dibz, is such an amazing and brave actor. But it was definitely always safety first. In no way was I willing to traumatize any crew or cast members by making this film, and in no way were we trying to put anybody’s lives in physical danger. We said if anything sketchy happens, we’d regroup at a meeting point. So we had precautions in place. There were a couple of people, as we were shooting throughout the day, who were like, “Why do you have such a large camera? What are you guys doing?” And we just said, “Oh, we’re an independent outlet,” and they loved the idea that we weren’t the corporate media.

In Pop Pop, we see some modern-looking scenes in the cyber sphere but also an older-looking computer with its loud typing sounds and retro-feeling pop-up windows and the like. Can you explain how important it was for you that the technology side of the story of the film was reflected by the visual experience?

I always love to ask what the organizing principle of a story is. I thought of this computer screen almost as a character to start priming the audience for the rules of that kind of existence. The idea was to put this device into this story that’s a deeply digital one.

And the digital space is a mix of stuff that we made up and actual memes. There are memes that would have been popular in 2016. There’s a Drake dancing, there’s Obama, they’re flying over what’s called the political compass, which is a meme that lets you self-locate where you are politically, and then there are some more obscure gems. My biggest dream for this movie is, and I’ll know I have made it then, that somebody writes a listicle called “25 Memes That You Can See in Pop Pop.”

Since you just mentioned the title again, how did you choose that?

To me, it was about the feeling of everything breaking apart. My generation in the States grew up with this idea that institutions were healthy and that there were certain social contracts that would never be broken. But we have seen in the past 12-plus years that there’s been a giant pickaxe that has been taken to that version of reality. So, the title is in reference to that breaking down and that combustible tinderbox energy of everything just sort of blowing up.

But it is also that this is pop filmmaking, which is about swallowing everything and metabolizing it so it becomes this different thing. Here’s all this imagery – let’s put it through the wringer and talk about it, interrogate it, and see where we land. So it’s a little bit of an accidental double entendre.

You say double entendre, so I need to ask you about that great double act that your two leads are. And Lena and the others give it all a real ensemble vibe.

These brilliant young actors are giving incredible performances. I cannot wait for people to see them. They are amazing. I really hope that we can introduce people to them. I am so excited for people to see them for the first time.

I assume you didn’t have a huge budget and didn’t win the lottery?

No, I worked to pay the bills and keep the lights on, producing big events for brands [and things like that as a day job]. I just kept Tetris-ing every single job I possibly could into my schedule without going absolutely insane. I was doing crazy shit, including following a giant Bath & Body Works candle around the Eastern Seaboard or going to the Grove in L.A. telling people to use circular Legos, not the square ones. I also got really lucky in that my collaborators were really down and kept coming back to this project time and time again.

I think this was true indie filmmaking. The hope and dream is that, as we watch in our industry all of these conglomerates sell to each other and combine forces, what happens is a healthier indie undercurrent, so that films like this and filmmakers who have ideas that are a little bit more out there can get their films made with less strife than five years of Tetris-ing so many jobs together.

In the “thank you” section of the credits, I saw the name Zazie Beetz. Is that THE Zazie Beetz?

Yes, she and her now-husband David [Rysdahl] did some very early development on this film.

After I watched Pop Pop, I felt motivated to try harder again to keep in dialogue with people who may not always share my political or other ideas or hopes. What’s your hope for audiences of Pop Pop?

I hope it causes massive fights and wrecks entire families. No, I’m kidding! (laughs) I really set out to make a movie about people who are right when they’re wrong and wrong when they’re right and what it means to be morally three-dimensional in a world that provides us with not many great options for being a good person.

So, yes, I wanted to ask how we deal with other people who we potentially don’t agree with, but we still have to be in community with. It’s really about thinking seriously about community building and coalition building. I think one of the things that this country has to do is to figure out how we can build coalitions, and part of that is joining hands with people that we don’t necessarily always agree with and figuring out what is still left in the concentric circles between us.

It’s my hope that folks can utilize the film as a jumping-off point to talk about their own struggles. A lot of us are about to go home for Thanksgiving and have anxiety-inducing political conversations around the family table. Perhaps, once you see this movie, instead of pointing to your uncle with whom you disagree, or fighting with your mother, you can look at these characters and use them as ciphers to have discussions instead of pointing fingers.

I’m hungry for other filmmakers to go out there and make films that really are responding to and rising to meet the moment, and I want to meet them.