The Beach Bum

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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With his broad bare shoulders and magnificent pecs, Matthew McConaughey has for years looked like a prototypical beach bum. At 49, he might not qualify as a youthful surfer dude, but you’d feel downright comfortable calling him The Great Kahuna.

In the new movie “The Beach Bum,” he’s known as Moondog.

You might think it’s typecasting.

Moondog is a bongo-playing stoner in a bright yellow wig and long floppy shorts, an aging poet who likes to hang out at the beach and smoke weed with his pal Lingerie (Snoop Dogg) or wander from Miami down to Key West with his wealthy wife Minnie (Isla Fisher) and a battered typewriter. All this activity is an excuse for not working on his Great American Novel, a project you know he will never get around to completing.

Along the way we meet his drug-addled friend Flicker (Zac Efron), his greedy literary agent (Jonah Hill), a crazed Vietnam vet known as Captain Whack (Martin Lawrence), , and Jimmy Buffett (playing himself).

“The Beach Bum” is chilling out this week at Tropic Cinema.

This is writer-director Harmony Korine’s first movie since “Spring Breakers.” That was his living-on-the-edge opus about vacationing teenage girls who fall under the spell of a criminal Svengali.

Between movies, Korine says, “I was doing a lot of just hanging out in the Keys with a lot of ex-smugglers and quasi-burnouts.” He likes to pursue what he calls “mistakist art,” capturing the bizarre interactions of eccentric outsiders.

“I started to feel like the times were changing, things were darker, everything was feeling more intense,” he said. “I thought, maybe it’s time to laugh. I figured I’d just go for it and make my version of a comedy.”

That led to “The Beach Bum.” The rambling storyline includes a bloody shark battle, a getaway plane flown by a blind pilot, wild partying with prostitutes, smashing a piano, and stealing some money.

“I wanted to make a film that was like a dirtier version of a Jimmy Buffet song – a crude, drunken ballad, an ode to excess,” said Korine. So he befriended the Parrothead singer and convinced him to make an appearance in the film.

“This movie’s not really super dark,” Korine argues. “Maybe some people will see it that way, because of all the debauchery, but it’s really joyous. The character’s wild, and it’s kind of a cosmic vision of America, more of a celebration than an indictment.”

As that debauched rapscallion Moondog says, “I just try to enjoy myself.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com