How to Talk to Girls at Parties review: One of the oddest, most original British films this year

An exercise in kitsch and high camp that combines inspired moments with scenes that make you want to curl up in acute embarrassment

Enn (Alex Sharp) immediately hits it off with Zann (Elle Fanning), a rebellious young alien who is very curious about what she calls the ‘punk colony’ (StudioCanal)

Dir John Cameron Mitchell, 103 mins, starring: Alex Sharp, Elle Fanning, Ruth Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Stephen Campbell Moore, Eloise Smyth, Matt Lucas

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a wondrously bizarre affair, an exercise in kitsch and high camp that combines inspired moments with scenes that make you want to curl up in acute embarrassment.

It features one of Nicole Kidman’s oddest and most jarring screen performances (channelling her inner Vivienne Westwood as the punk godmother, Queen Boadicea) and a beguiling one from Elle Fanning, as the young alien heroine.

The film is based on a short story by Neil Gaiman. Early on, before we encounter the visitors from another planet, it seems to be shaping up as a nostalgic, punk-era version of The In-Betweeners. Its main protagonists are three lippy, Clash and Sex Pistols-loving adolescents whose sneering sarcasm can’t hide their own youth and naivety.

Enn (Alex Sharp) is the young hero growing up in Croydon in 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee. Bunting and union jacks are everywhere. The boys’ parents are having street parties but Enn and his two best friends are in favour of anarchy in the UK.

They are also keen to have their first romantic adventures. When they get lost on the way to a party, they turn up at a suburban house full of latex-wearing cult members. “They must be from California,” the boys conclude after listening to some of the prog rock-like music they relax to. In fact, the cult members are from another planet.

They’ve come to earth on a reconnaissance mission. Enn (“short for Henry”) immediately hits it off with Zann (Fanning), a rebellious young alien who is very curious about what she calls the “punk colony”.

Director John Cameron Mitchell does a fair job of evoking the era of “God Save The Queen”, Malcolm McLaren et al. There’s lot of spitting, jumping around in mosh pits, and one-chord-wonder-style music. The punks’ rituals are nothing like as barbaric as those of the aliens, who eat their young and engage in very strange sexual practices.

Throughout the film, the exotic and the everyday are in a permanent state of collision. The filmmakers relish placing the aliens in the heart of suburban London and in showing Enn and Zann enjoying themselves on a dilapidated looking council estate.

We get to see Zann on stage, performing in such a bizarre, Bjork-like way that she enraptures a hostile crowd. “Your penis is small and folded, like a tiny pink flower,” she tells Enn at one stage early in their courtship but he doesn’t take it personally.

At first, the punks and the aliens get on famously. Neither group is “normal”. The punks even seem to find it charming that the aliens vomit when they are kissed.

In its lesser moments, How to Talk to Girls at Parties resembles one of those Comic Strip Presents spoofs or Rocky Horror knockoffs from the 1980s.

The production values aren’t especially high. Some of the performances (notably Kidman, with her excruciating, pantomime-style English accent) are very overstated. Matters reach their nadir in the scene when she leads an army of young punks in an attack on the aliens.

As a story about growing pains, first love and a germ-filled punk adolescence, however, the film has plenty of charm. Fanning and Sharp show an obvious rapport as the young couple from different sides of the galaxy. Whatever its longueurs and excesses, this is both one of the oddest and most original films that will hit British cinemas this year.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties hits UK cinemas 11 May.