Marcello (Mattia Minasi) is in town ostensibly taking “industry” meetings for his father, an Italian soap opera megastar, but really just wants to have fun. Frustrated by his demanding dad — who expects his son to actually attend the meetings — Marcello bonds with Nassim (Neyssan Falahi), a French-Iranian actor/personal trainer searching for meaning, on the pier in Malibu. The next day, the young men meet free-spirited waitress/photographer/conceptual artist Christine (Cristina Rambaldi), and they quickly become inseparable.
Before anyone has slept together, the couch-surfing Nassim and Christine, who has recently been sleeping in an all-night Korean spa, accept Marcello’s offer to share an apartment paid for by his father’s credit card. A trip to Joshua Tree consummates the threesome’s relationship just in time for the idyllic, unsustainable fantasy to be intruded upon by reality.
The cast is appealing and the performances have a fizzy buoyancy: the boyishly handsome Minasi infuses the callow Marcello with a disarming cluelessness; Falahi’s Nassim is a convincing thinker — imagine a bearded John Lennon with the physique of a boxer; and Rambaldi, as the playfully seductive Christine, lends the arrangement a degree of credibility. Who wouldn’t be smitten?