After bruised single mother Jacqueline McKenzie gets kicked out of her house by her psychotic boyfriend, she picks up her sick dog, her cape-wearing preteen son, and her lesbian nurse friend, and spends the next two days driving around, figuring out how best to straighten out her life. First step? Kill the dog. Freak Weather partly resembles Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore—from the warm color palette to the peculiar bond between a flaky mom and her know-it-all son—but McKenzie never starts over and never gets anywhere. She's too chronically indecisive, and every instinct to escape is countered by a stronger instinct to wait around one more day, just in case her luck changes. And even if it doesn't, well, maybe somebody's got some drugs they're willing to share.
Writer-director Mary Kuryla pitches Freak Weather halfway between realism and absurdity, and like John Cassavetes—a clear influence—she confuses extreme emotion and intense pathos with truth. The movie starts out comically bizarre and becomes pointlessly violent, driven by behavior and characters so far outside the norm that they're useful only as metaphors for abandonment. Freak Weather also suffers from an overbearing heavy-metal score, and too many name actors in small roles. Casting Aida Turturro, John Heard, and Jerry Adler may help secure financing, but that comes at the expense of a distracted audience saying "Hey, look, it's the supporting cast of The Sopranos."
But though the whole of Freak Weather is too forced and fitful, significant stretches of the movie hold together. McKenzie gives a magnetic performance as a woman who acts on every momentary whim, lying to whomever she has to in order to get what she wants. As her son, Jacob Chase gives her plenty of chances to lie, as he asks too many questions about the guys she meets, where they're going, and what's going to happen to the dog. Like a lot of kids with absentee parents, Chase has developed a keen mind and a weird personality without any outside input beyond what he found on his own. He's the kind of boy who would wear a cape. On the other hand, Kuryla is the kind of filmmaker who'd put him in one just because it looked appropriately nutty.