Film Review: Egghead & Twinkie

Egghead & Twinkie
Director: Sarah Kambe Holland

Canbedone Films, Orange Cat Films
Limited Release: 03.01

I’ve often wondered what the contributions from my generation (Gen-Z) to film will look like.  We’ve long had creative voices born in the mid-’90s in front of the camera, but we’re starting to see a shift behind the indie camera, as well, as with A24’s upcoming ‘Backrooms’ project. This is the context from which Egghead & Twinkie arises.

Writer/director Sarah Kambe Holland touts her feature debut as a coming-of-age story created by and for Generation Z. Crowdfunded through TikTok—Gen Z’s #1 hangout spot and virtual enemy of the state—in late 2020, the film now credits itself as the first to do so. The result is a movie that looks and feels exactly how you’d think a TikTok-funded, Gen Z-created project would, for better or worse.

Egghead & Twinkie follows 17-year-old, Asian-American girl, Twinkie, played by Sabrina Jieafa, as she embarks on a journey to finally meet up with the older influencer and maybe-girlfriend of Twinkie, B.D. (an abbreviation of her Instagram handle, Big Dyke). Along for the ride is her best friend, Egghead, played by Louis Tomeo, unaware of the plan to meet up with B.D. and believing this to be a last hurrah before he goes to college. An otherwise standard road trip comedy, the film unfolds through a complicated framing device, opening with Twinkie and Egghead feuding at a diner four days into their trip. 

Egghead asks Twinkie to honestly recount the events of the past four days. Twinkie spends the first 45 minutes of the runtime telling Egghead what was really going on (with him providing comedic interjections), leaving the last third of the film to take place after they’ve left the diner. While the back-and-forth structure of the first half did add some flavor to an otherwise straightforward story, it sometimes got too “cutaway gag” for my taste. I much preferred the final portion, where Egghead’s interjections could no longer kill the momentum of Twinkie’s story.

Egghead’s character is my biggest problem. While I see what they were going for (riffing on Pretty in Pink‘s Ducky and other lovestruck best friends), the attempt to make Egghead a ”funny ball of energy” doesn’t stick the landing. The script pushes him too far into annoying territory for his obliviousness and ignorance of Twinkie’s sexuality to actually come across as funny, and Tomeo’s bubbly performance feels forced in crucial moments. He’s less the ball of energy itself and more akin to Sisyphus heaving it up the hill.

Meanwhile, Jieafa’s performance as Twinkie is often exactly what it needs to be, culminating in the film’s best and most climactic scene when she’s on the phone with B.D. realizing her misread of the situationship. The dialogue is real, the emotions on both sides are complex and Jieafa’s honest reaction nearly brought me to tears. It’s not a coincidence that the best scene in Egghead & Twinkie is Egghead-less

The film is littered with animations from Jill Cefalo-Sanders, including chibi representations of Egghead and Twinkie and drawn-out sounds and onomatopoeia, evoking manga and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, respectively. The animation work has a hand-drawn charm to it, which adds a lot of character to the film and to Twinkie, who is revealed to be the in-universe artist behind these drawings at the end. 

The Scott Pilgrim comparisons don’t end there. Director Edgar Wright‘s whip-pans, smooth transitions and high-energy crash zoom montages are pasted directly into Egghead & Twinkie‘s visual style. One particular transition—Twinkie lies in bed at night, cut, Twinkie lies in bed in the morning in the same position—is preserved beat for beat. 

This is a debut film for Holland, and there’s nothing wrong with imitating your influences, but it does mean that Holland’s most interesting directing choices feel like somebody else’s. That being said, I’ve seen much worse imitations. The mixing of animation and footage feels natural, and with several great visual gags that stand on their own, I look forward to seeing how Holland’s directing style comes into its own in future works.

Egghead & Twinkie is a crowdfunded project that clearly means a lot to Holland, the creative team and those who funded it. It’s a film made by and starring Gen-Z, and it can’t be discounted how exciting that is for younger zoomers. On top of that, Twinkie is a 17-year-old girl who feels ostracized from her Chinese heritage (she was adopted and raised by white parents) and is also striving to realize her own sexuality and find her place in the LGBTQ+ community. These kinds of narratives are sometimes hard to find in movies, and one look at the Letterboxd and IMDb reviews proves that queer members of Gen-Z are ready to rally for them.

Egghead & Twinkie is a low-budget comedy that wears its heart and influences on its sleeve, and it’s sure to resonate deeply with its target audience, even if its unavoidable rough edges and TikTok flavor might earn it indifference from older generations and those hungry for a little more. –Max Bennion

Read more reviews of recent films: 
Film Review: The Starling Girl 
Film Review: Carmen