A Rainy Day in New York

Timothée Chalamet plays Gatsby Welles, student at upstate Yardley college and scion of "a farrago of WASP plutocrats" whose autumn bash he’s desperate to avoid. His moniker makes for something of a red herring, even if F Scott Fitzgerald’s narrative comes fully to bear on the film’s final act, with Gatsby more readily equatable with the "hostile rebellion" of JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. His girlfriend Ashleigh is travelling in to New York to interview filmmaker Roland Pollard for the college paper, and Gatsby, "a wannabe Sky Masterson", has promised to show her the sights, flush with cash following a poker game.
As Ashleigh arrives at an upmarket hotel to interview Pollard, the film branches into a pair of narrative threads. Gatsby bumps into Shannon, younger sister of an old flame, at a student film shoot and is roped into kissing her on camera just as the heavens open, even though he’s still despairing and paranoid at Ashleigh’s persistent rain checks. Meanwhile Pollard, his writer and star, makes passes at the naive 21-year-old journalist. (Matt Thrift)