Monument Releasing
Audio By Carbonatix
“We were kind of like Hollywood’s dirty secret,” says Kyle Gallner, star of 2020’s provocative rom-com Dinner In America.
The film, directed by Adam Rehmeier, stars Gallner as Simon, the lead singer of punk rock band Psyops. After he’s released from an institution, he finds himself scrounging through the Midwest seeking money and asylum. He has a chance encounter with a young woman named Patty, played by Emily Skeggs, who is obsessed with Psyops and takes him in to her family’s home. The two end up raising hell across town, getting back at those who slighted them and finding themselves along the way.
The film premiered at Sundance in a pre-COVID 2020, leaving the festival with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes but no distribution deal.
“Everybody would watch the fuck out of us but they wouldn’t take us on,” Rehmeier says.
“It’s a rough and tumble movie. It’s something that pushes buttons and boundaries, and I think people were scared of it,” Gallner adds. “COVID hit and we just never got our day in court.”
Dinner In America lived on in relative obscurity through the pandemic before quietly landing a spot on Hulu in September of 2022. Gallner has since become a star, appearing in a run of successful horror movies including Smile, Strange Darling and the 2022 reboot of Scream.
Rehmeier went on to direct the semi-autobiographical comedy Snack Shack in 2024. Skeggs has taken a step back from film acting, spending time onstage, on audio plays and on her homemade gardening business.
Earlier this year, Gallner and Rehmeier announced that they would be reuniting for the upcoming Carolina Caroline, a crime-thriller film. While on set, the two noticed something peculiar. The two started receiving TikTok videos of people around the world lip-syncing lines and song lyrics from the Dinner in America.
“We were just showing each other videos back and forth the whole time we were filming,” Gallner says on a mini-reunion with Rehmeier and Skeggs via Zoom.
“When I looked at it, it was like maybe 900 videos of people lip-syncing and stuff,” Rehmeier recalls. “Now it’s beyond 250,000. My mind is completely blown.”
There are currently 117.9k videos alone that feature the film’s original “Watermelon” song, performed by Gallner and Skegg, and several fan-made video edits of the film have over 1 million likes. Inexplicably, and without any proper theatrical run or studio-backed promotion, Dinner In America had reached its target audience.
“It’s a punk rock movie. It’s a movie about disrupting the system,” Gallner says. “We have a chance here, something’s happening. So let’s see if we can’t do that ourselves and take it to the people.”
On Sept. 26, Gallner posted a call-to-action to his Instagram.
“This movie is in a full-fledged ‘thing’,” he said in the video. “We’re dead serious about figuring out a way to get some screenings going, getting this thing into theaters. But we’re gonna need some help, gonna need your help. If you got a local theater, a little indie theater, you know somebody, let’s start reaching out.”
On Oct. 7, the film got its first confirmed date at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, set for Nov. 27. The one date alone was cause for celebration: a cast and crew used social media to continue promoting their film years after its release and incited a groundswell fanbase to get the film back in theaters. It’s unprecedented, and it was only the beginning.
At time of publication, Dinner In America has 37 confirmed screening dates across the United States and Canada, three of them at our hometown Texas Theatre, which will screen the film on Saturday, Nov. 23, Sunday, Nov. 24, and Wednesday, Nov. 27.
“It’s just taken on a life of its own,” Gallner says. “We’re getting picked up all over the place.”
At an Oct. 29 screening at the IFC Center in New York, Rehmeier, Gallner and Skeggs reunited on-stage and delivered a Q&A session after the show.
“The whole resurgence has really been fan-driven,” Skeggs says. “It’s truly been so beautiful to get to meet these people who see themselves in Patty and Simon and resonate with them.”
There were more than a few Patty costumes in the audience, some of their wearers having donned her signature bright striped shirts or the smock she’s forced to wear at her job.
“I was a little scared making this movie,” Skeggs says. “I loved Patty, and I was hoping other people would love her too. Adam was really pulling out and exaggerating things that I naturally do with my face that in normal life, I hide. I’ve since embraced it. For me, it was freeing, it felt like freeing parts of myself that I’d kind of tamped down.”
In the film, Patty is implied to be neurodivergent, something that Rehmeier was intentional to include.
“I think that’s what most of the beige kind of Hollywood distribution was afraid of,” he says. “The things they were most afraid of were the things that everyone has gravitated towards and feels absolutely seen. We have neurodivergent characters interacting with neurotypical characters in a way that isn’t looking down on them.”
When an audience feels represented, the art comes to life. The crew describes a rollicking environment at these screenings where fans are able to interact with each other and the film in-person for the first time.
“It’s like its own little punk rock concert,” Gallner says. “People are showing up with their jackets they’ve made, they’re handing out bracelets and pins. It’s very cool, very DIY.”
“I just feel very overloaded suddenly trying to keep up with everything,” Rehmeier adds. “I see all this amazing artwork, really rad, beautiful tattoos and cover songs. It reminds me of when I was younger and I went to the movies and there was a line outside to get in. When you came out, it sparked a dialogue or discussion about what you’d just seen. If a movie can do that, it’s doing something that justifies going to it. It reminds me of a bygone era where that atmosphere was created by a movie.”
Rehmeier says he’d love for the movie to have a shelf life like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where an energetic live interaction with the movie is part of its appeal.
“I like to go and be rowdy in the movies,” he says. “I love the crowd play. This movie is 100% designed to be seen big. When you’re in a group of two or three hundred people, the way the laughter rolls around, it’s an amazing experience.”
Dallasites have their chance to go and be rowdy at the movies this weekend. Dinner In America screens for three nights at the Texas Theatre. Organic movements in art like this are a rare, beautiful thing that can be experienced only squarely in the moment.
Even though the Dinner In America‘s moment won’t last forever, it continues to clear a path for unsung filmmakers to buck the system and remind audiences of the single most important lesson in art: the power is in your hands, so use it. “We gave everything to this movie,” Gallner says. “We love these characters, we love working together and we’ve created this lifelong friendship between all of us. Cook with love and the food comes out better. That’s what’s happening here, and I think people are feeling that. They’re relating to these characters, they’re relating to the thing that we’ve created. Come out swinging and you’ll never know what happens, but I think people will find the stuff they’re supposed to find.”
