This ode to the young and aspiring on the fringes of Hollywood is as dull as dishwater, as obviously manipulative as the clown at a 6 year old's birthday party and so rote and lifeless it can't even be unintentionally entertaining.
The Low Life focuses on a young man named John (Rory Cochrane). He's newly moved to Los Angeles and trying to make it as a writer. Or at least he's pretending to try and make it as a writer. John has two friends, a roommate and a perfect head of hair like The Wolfman from that Warren Zevon song. John and his friends work crappy temp jobs while they wait for success to fall into their laps. The plot of the film, such as it is, revolves around John meeting a woman who has to make her life into a series of little dramas and him getting a new roommate who's more desperate to be liked than a dog at the pound one day from getting put to sleep. John also wears a suit and walks around a lot. That's pretty much the whole movie. I know that seems like I'm leaving something out.
I'm not.
This film isn't classically bad. You can usually enjoy making fun of a bad film. The Low Life is a void, like someone took an eraser and rubbed out everything interesting in life. Rory Cochrane as John is about a responsive as a deaf-mute on tranquilizers. He ambles from scene to scene like he's in a daze. John never really does anything. He never really says anything. In fact, every other character in the movie has more personality than John, clichéd as those personalities may be. His friend Chad (Ron Livingston) is a resentful rich man's son who looks and sounds like he was purchased at Stereotypes R' Us. His other friend Leonard (Christian J. Meoli) is a spastic loser who exists in the script to provide exposition and serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. Kyra Sedgwick plays the contrivedly colorful woman who drifts into John's life and finds him appealing for no discernible reason. Sean Astin is the needy roommate and gives a performance straight out of an Afterschool Special about the kid nobody likes who winds up killing himself and/or blowing up the school.
If you put a knife to my throat and made me guess, I'd say this movie is meant to be some sort of coming-of-age tale about being young and poor in LA. The problem is that John and his friends are all lazy, pretentious bastards. They constantly whine about how hard it is to get ahead, yet none of them would know an honest day's work if it kicked them in the crotch. Sedgwick and Astin's characters are potentially more appealing, but they never rise above arbitrarily dysfunctional objects which the emptiness that is John has to deal with.
The only marginally appealing thing about this movie is that it makes you realize the Ron Livingston has been mimicking Rory Cochrane for much of his career. I'd swear that Livingston has been stealing bits and pieces of Cochrane's alienated slacker acting job here for a great many of his future films, including Office Space. But even the sense of deja vu that gives you when watching The Low Life isn't enough to make it worthwhile.
This is a story of unsympathetic people who do nothing but get more unsympathetic as you watch them. Renting this movie might be a cheap cure for insomnia, but I think you'd be better off with warm milk or drugs.
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