Who needs sweetie-pie Noah back home and his “night night” texts?Watch Video: Watch Harry Styles, Bill Clinton Honor Fleetwood Mac at MusiCares BenefitWhen Hardin takes Tessa to his secret place - a dock on a lake (he’s sensitive!) - she strips and puts on his Ramones T-shirt, and we sense her subjugation is nearly complete. (Mom’s not happy.) In class she meets studious good guy Landon (Shane Paul McGhie, “What Men Want”), but at an alcohol-fueled party she’s drawn to English major Hardin, the accented rogue who reads hardback novels, grumbles disinterestedly, then toys with nearly kissing her. (Which somehow required four screenwriters, including Todd, to pull off.)When fresh-faced Tessa arrives at college with squeaky-clean, still-in-high-school boyfriend Noah (Dylan Arnold, 2018’s “Halloween”) and controlling mom (Selma Blair) in tow, she finds a bustier-sporting lesbian dorm-mate (Khadijha Red Thunder) with nose studs and dyed hair ready to distract her from, ugh, studying.
Except that when straight-arrow freshman Tessa (Josephine Langford, “Wish Upon”) and British bad-boy Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) duke it out in lit class over “Pride and Prejudice” - she calls it feminist and empowering, he scoffs that “love is a transaction” - their exchange sounds cut-and-pasted from book reports, because for the entire rest of the movie, they, and everyone else, talk like monosyllabic grade-schoolers. Harry Styles is still alive, but why shouldn’t he start practicing now? “After,” one of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory - based on Anna Todd’s popular Harry-inspired fanfic, in which the One Direction singer embodies a brooding college student - is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.“After,” which wasn’t screened in advance for critics, also falls into that desperately referential category of love story that name-checks Austen and the Brontes as if that automatically places itself in the same lineage of swoon-worthy classics. James Dean quit rolling in his grave out of boredom ages ago.