



The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” but it’s unlikely that he had anything like Bobcat Goldthwait’s outrageous new satire, God Bless America in mind when he said that.

The most vicious, hilarious and timely takedown of American culture since Network, God Bless America follows the downward trajectory of the dismal life of Frank (Joel Murray), an unemployed sad-sack everyman who is given the sort of medical diagnosis that no one wants to hear. Alone, dejected, depressed and suicidal, Frank opts to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, but is distracted by a monstrously selfish Beverly Hills teenager on a TV reality show. In a flash, Frank decides that if he’s going to go, he’s going to take this pampered brat with him.

Frank’s execution of Chloe is witnessed by one of her classmates, Roxy, played by Tara Lynne Barr in perhaps the single most gleefully nihilistic performances a teenage girl has ever given in all of cinematic history. Roxy’s Tarantino-esque rant about why Alice Cooper is the greatest, most influential rockstar of all time— I mean, she does prove it here beyond all argument— is one of the film’s comic highlights.

Egged on by his curiously homicidal teen accomplice, Frank decides to mow down more rude, selfish people before his disease takes him. Like a Bonnie and Clyde for the YouTube era, Frank and Roxy embark on a wave of carnage and mayhem, eliminating a blowhard TV pundit based on Glenn Beck, religious extremists and in the film’s over-the-top climax, most of the studio audience at an American Idol-type program.

As Frank so earnestly puts it: “I only want to kill people who deserve to die.”

Below, Bobcat Goldthwait talks about his outrageous new comedy God Bless America:



