Chasing Chasing Amy

CHASING AMY is the third film in director Kevin Smith’s New Jersey Trilogy, which includes CLERKS and MALLRATS as the other two films. CHASING AMY is widely regarded as a product of its time. It’s a divisive film for some, and comfort food for others including director Sav Rodgers who found it to be a port in the storm as a queer teen growing up in rural Kansas. To him, it is literally a movie that saved his life, and we get to see him examine their passion and gratitude for Kevin Smith’s movie in his own documentary CHASING CHASING AMY.

Smith’s CHASING AMY stars Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams and is set in 1990s New Jersey. The movie is sometimes regarded as problematic by today’s standards with a most commonly used slur against it being central to one of the movie’s more forthright themes that the right straight man can turn a lesbian into a heterosexual. Director Sav Rodgers sees more than that in CHASING AMY and charts a course through their own childhood history and the making of and cultural impact of the movie in their doc, which is an unlikely love letter from a member of the LGBTQIA+ community about a film that is often seen as overtly homophobic.

With a wide variety of interviews from different voices of and representing a multitude of points of views from within the film industry including critics, people involved directly in the making of the film, film festival alums, and other filmmakers. CHASING CHASING AMY leaves no stone unturned to uncover the deeper meaning of the movie it is pro ling while still keeping it personal to Rodgers’ life.

Interviews with important figures like Guinevere Turner, who wrote the black and white indie hit GO FISH which came out a bit before CLERKS and speaks candidly about her relationship to Kevin Smith and her “romantic friendship” with Smith’s producer Scott Mosier, which has some semblance to the Holden/Alyssa relationship in CHASING AMY.

One thing that stood out to me was Sav’s experiences going around to the shooting spaces of CHASING AMY and CLERKS, as well as his trip to Smith’s comic book store Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, and how he states after going to these places “I don’t feel transformed emotionally or anything but, it’s cool to come to a place where my life was weirdly affected in a positive way.” This is something very unique to the Kevin Smith oeuvre of filmmaking. He makes movies in real places that anyone can visit. You can go to the Quick Stop convenience store where Smith shot CLERKS right now, or to the movie theater that Kevin owns in Atlantic Highlands and where he shot his latest film THE 4:30 MOVIE. You can walk around, as Rodgers does in his doc, to the locations where Kevin shot CHASING AMY. Kevin’s movies feel real to his fans because they can interact with them on a personal and physical level. You don’t get that kind of access to most Hollywood features or directors.

Throughout the movie Sav comes off as an astute fan of Smith’s work, with an affable and awkward vulnerability that makes you want to sit down and have deep conversations about movies from the perspective of a true appreciator of the artform. Sav’s willingness to explore the question of “why” when it comes to both himself and to CHASING AMY is important, and it’s noted in the documentary that despite CHASING AMY being directed and written by a straight white man, it is at least an honest and raw look at complicated relationships from that perspective, with no malicious undertones or agenda towards the queer community.

Midway through the movie we are treated to wonderful pieces of Sav in a personal way like seeing him getting engaged to his girlfriend in Times Square, and his coming out as a transgender man to Kevin in a touching off-camera moment. These intimate shares also come with reveals of his personal struggle with love, identity, and acceptance.

There’s a part towards the last third of the doc that focuses on Joey Lauren Adams and her experiences during the time that CHASING AMY was at Sundance, and the fallout of her relationship with Kevin Smith during that time, and subsequently how that time of her life affected her deeply in traumatic ways. She lays bare the way that Hollywood treats women. She talks about Harvey Weinstein and his constant abuse of actresses during that time like Rose McGowen, and how she was constantly barraged by a parade of toxic men in and around the industry. Seeing a movie like CHASING CHASING AMY is a wonderful example of how representation matters in all forms. How movies literally save lives, and how Kevin Smith is more than just a bag of vulgar dick jokes in a ballcap and jacket. Sometimes it’s good to meet your heroes. I hope I get a chance to meet Sav someday.