Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and her good friend Malcolm (Ty Hickson) have big plans, or big plans for them, anyway, as teenage residents of New York City who wish to make an indelible mark on the place. After stealing a clutch of paint spray cans, they set about finding an area to put their names, and find it near the top of a roof. Pleased with their graffiti they return the following day to admire their work only to see with dismay it has been defaced with insults from a rival bunch, and deflated they ponder their next move. Which could be the bright idea they regard as the Holy Grail of graffiti: writing their names on the New York Mets' home run apple.
The what? As is explained for the benefit of those who don't follow American baseball, whenever the Mets score a home run there is an apple display which pops up to celebrate, and the idea of tagging this object with a name to secure a place in legend is, according to this, eminently desirable to the local graffiti artists. However, if you went into this anticipating some kind of caper movie, then that's not what was on offer as the distinguishing characteristic of both Sofia and Malcolm was their ineptitude, since every crime they attempt after that theft of the spray cans is doomed to utter failure - we don't even see the object of their tagging desire.
At first you think this pair are nothing but teenage kleptomaniacs, and writer and director Adam Leon, graduating to his own feature after a spell working with Woody Allen, refuses to depict them as dreadful petty crimninals as a more judgemental movie might. You may have reservations about this approach in the beginning, but then you twig he is not endorsing their behaviour either, simply showing them as they are without comment, or at least without an overt comment as you had to be patient to understand how he felt about the duo. There is good reason to be suspicious of films where the creators don't like their characters, but that's not the case here.
That was down to Leon allowing occasional scenes where the teens' humanity was allowed to appear, crafting more rounded characters than other filmmakers might have delivered should they have wished to play up the mean and moody life on the streets. While both of them get up to morally dodgy behaviour, they don't carry guns, the only drugs we see them partake in is marijuana which doesn't seem to do them any harm, and they don't attack anyone, as if their conscience is not entirely dormant and a better nature is present, if not always out on display. They decide they need money for their grand scheme, and the rest of the movie concerns itself with how they go about that.
Or not, as the case may be, with them splitting up early and Malcolm getting the brush-off from the dealer he usually get his money from by acting as his delivery boy. He manages to get some of the man's product and sets about selling it with a view to pocketing the cash, but is distracted by his first customer, an upper class daughter (Zoë Lescaze) of Manhattanites who almost, but not quite, seduces him for kicks. This near miss obsesses him for the rest of the movie, not only sexually but avariciously too as he thinks he can rob her apartment of an expensive necklace, but even that runs aground on the shore of reality seeing as how he and his cohorts are hopeless at crime. That's not the sole reason Gimme the Loot (surely an ironic title) is surprisingly funny, as the dialogue, peppered with swearing, prompts amusingly off the wall exchanges and observations, and against the odds the possible romantic connection between Sofia and Malcolm which they cannot perceive but we can is unexpectedly sweet. Leon packed a lot into a movie which didn't even last ninety minutes, plenty of it entertaining. Music by Nicholas Britell.
