If you’ve ever been stuck in a bar at last call, nursing the last of too many drinks and overly confessing to someone who looks like trouble – this one hits.
Set in a smoky, late-night Los Angeles that feels just slightly out of time, Choose Me follows Eve, a former call girl turned bar owner, who offers relationship advice on the radio while struggling with intimacy in her own life. When a charming drifter named Mickey – recently released from a psychiatric hospital – walks into her bar, he sets off a chain of seductions, confessions, and collisions among a group of romantically entangled loners, each hiding from the truth they keep trying to tell.
The whole thing has this hazy, neon-after-midnight vibe – everyone’s been awake too long, smoked too much, and started telling the truth by accident. It’s romantic, but in a jagged, world-weary way. Nobody in this movie knows how to ask for love directly – they seduce by circling.
Everyone’s wounded. Everyone’s performing. And they talk like discarded lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song. Fallen angels turned lounge philosophers – luminous, brittle, always halfway through a goodbye.
I love this kind of talky, romantic existentialism. I spent a good chunk of my misspent youth with people vaguely like this – drifting through after-hours parties that left me liminal, hungover, and half in love with strangers I’d never see again. Those heady nights when you’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and looking for a connection. Or maybe some therapy. Just not necessarily in that order.