It's a messy, childish scrawl of a film, but it is high on energy.

Not so much bleeding edge as screeching edge, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a frenetic piece of pop-art social satire that strives to be super-current but feels oddly traditional beneath its eye-searing, pixel-popping surface.

Mainstream may be up-to-date on stylistic grounds, but its narrative could use refreshing.

Mainstream feels far more like a callow freshman effort, frantically tricked out with visual gimmicks and affected whimsy, none of which freshen up its palpably millennial stance on that ever-renewing question of whether or not the kids are all right.

The problem with Mainstream is it isn’t plugged deep enough into the culture it’s satirizing to really even know what its target is, let alone how to hit it.