Available on DVD: “Bellflower”

Evan Godell in Bellflower

Like any well-made piece of nihilism, Bellflower is a contradiction in terms. If nothing really matters — if all we’re doing is sucking down beer until the apocalypse — then why bother making a movie about it? Why waste your time with art at all? Why expend time, money and effort on crafting such a visually striking portrait of sloshed losers building a flamethrower?

But maybe this isn’t an exercise in nihilism. Maybe it’s a commentary on hollow lives and aimless fantasy, one fueling the other until the real world (and its real emotions) forcefully intrude. The protagonists and their idle dreams of a fiery wasteland may well be nihilistic. But the movie — with its stunning cinematography and lingering aftertaste of old-school heartbreak — most assuredly is not.

Aiden (Tyler Dawson) and Woodrow (debut writer-director-producer-editor Evan Glodell) are low-life slackers with a twist. Having grown up on Mad Max, they now devote all their free time to planning for Armageddon. Whether they believe the end times are truly coming isn’t clear, and doesn’t matter; what is and does is their obsession with the coolness of it all, the guns and cars and vistas pocked by fire.

Glodell’s screenplay takes a couple of har turns in its second half, one of them an unoriginal bait-and-switch that may infuriate viewers. But without it, there’s absolutely no reconciling the hard-core, hyper-violent absurdity of the movie’s final act with the oddball sweetness of the first. Either way, the bracingly stylized look of the film is bound to impress.