Dinner in America isn't just another indie darling—it’s a film that makes misfits feel like main characters. It’s a love letter to outsiders, weirdo girls, punk boys, the neurodivergent, the anxious, the ones who spent middle school clutching their iPods like a life raft. If its massive TikTok resurgence is any proof, young women—especially neurodivergent ones—have claimed it as their own.
And why wouldn’t they? Cinema has spent decades feeding us love stories where one person “fixes” the other. Dinner in America is the rare kind of romance that doesn’t demand a transformation. Simon is unhinged. Patty is awkward. They don’t sand down each other’s edges or repackage themselves for mass consumption. They love each other, exactly as they are—Whac–A–Mole machines and all.
Which is why when producer Ross Putnam tweeted about my article on this film, I skipped down Locust Walk like I was late to accept my Oscar. And when I found out I’d be interviewing the film’s entire creative team—Putnam, along with director Adam Rehmeier and stars Kyle Gallner and Emily Skeggs—it felt like slipping into an alternate timeline. My first time interviewing a Hollywood leading lady, a leading man, a director, and a producer was beyond my wildest dreams.
That honesty—raw, loud, and completely unfiltered—is exactly what made me want to talk to the people who brought Dinner in America to life. We talked about casting struggles, music, cult followings, and how playing Patty literally healed Emily Skeggs’s inner child.
Adam Rehmeier always knew Dinner in America would live or die by its two leads, and he needed actors who weren’t afraid to get messy. Simon and Patty couldn’t be played by someone acting like an outsider; they had to feel real.
But finding them? That was a whole journey of its own.
Rehmeier cast Patty multiple times before landing on Skeggs. Every time they got close, the actress would back out. Something about Patty—the sheer, unfiltered weirdness of her—seemed to scare people. The idea of playing someone so unapologetically themselves was too much. Which, in retrospect, is hilarious. Because as Rehmeier put it, “For Patty of all people, you can’t have someone scared of themselves.”
Then came Skeggs. A theater kid with a Tony nomination under her belt, Skeggs didn’t just understand Patty—she was her. “She’s not a character or script you see very often,” she told me. “And that’s coming from both an actor and a lover of movies.” She saw so much of herself in Patty that, to this day, her husband would catch her doing something and say, “That is so Patty.”
Her audition tape remains one of Rehmeier’s all–time favorites. The scene she sent in was Patty’s alleyway meet–cute with Simon, that first chaotic collision of two people who had no business finding each other but somehow fit perfectly. Watching it, Rehmeier knew: That’s Patty. If he had his way, Skeggs would still be wearing the shirt from that audition in interviews. “Maybe if we do Dinner in America 2,” he joked.
Kyle Gallner, deadpan: “For the love of God, can we?”
Adam Rehmeier, thinking: “Maybe we can do Breakfast in Canada.”
Ross Putnam, ever the realist: “There is no script or money for a sequel.”
Emily Skeggs, grinning: “But there are ideas!!”
Casting Simon was just as unpredictable. Gallner was, according to Rehmeier, “a hard one to catch.” In Gallner’s defense, he had just had a son—though the way he phrased it in our interview made it sound like he had personally given birth. Meanwhile, Rehmeier had already decided he wanted Gallner for Simon, and not because of an audition. He had seen a tintype photograph Gallner took at Sundance—a haunting, old–school portrait that looked straight out of another century. There was something about the image, a mix of sharpness and vulnerability, that reminded him of James Dean.
“When I’m looking for someone for a role, I like to find things beyond their performances,” Rehmeier explained. “I usually watch people in interviews. I want to see how they talk, how they work mechanically.” Gallner had that raw, restless, simmering energy. He was already Simon. He just didn’t know it yet.
“There’s a little bit of Simon and Patty in everybody,” he added. “I think everybody relates to one or both of these characters in their own way.”
That chemistry translated offscreen, too. “The unconditional love and respect that you see between Simon and Patty is very reflective of the real love and respect that I have for Kyle,” Skeggs said at one point, smiling.
Gallner, without missing a beat: “Yeah!”
It’s funny, looking back, that both actors almost didn’t end up in the film. That it took false starts and cold feet, near–misses, and ghosting, for the movie to find its people. But maybe that’s fitting. Because Dinner in America is about exactly that—finding the people who see you exactly as you are, no fixing required.
Rehmeier never set out to make a love story. He didn’t start with Patty, or even the idea of the film as it exists now. He started with a punk kid who was willing to sell his body to science to fund his music.
Years ago, while at the University of Nebraska, Rehmeier kept seeing these flyers for Harris Laboratories—clinical trials where students could make quick cash by volunteering for medical experiments. He and his friends joked about it constantly. “Let’s go get $3000. Let’s go get $5000. I wonder what they’ll do to us.” But no one ever actually signed up.
A decade later, Rehmeier was home for Christmas, walking outside in the snow. The crunch of salt under his boots, the rhythm of his steps on frozen pavement—it was weirdly specific, but suddenly, there he was. Simon. Rehmeier could hear the way the character would walk, see the way he would carry himself. And from there Simon took shape.
Dinner in America came in flashes, in sparks over years, bits of lived experience that eventually wove themselves into a film. His creative process is anything but conventional. His work swings wildly between genres—his past projects include everything from The Bunny Game, a piece of actual catharsis for an actress processing her real–life trauma, to Carolina Caroline, a romantic crime thriller currently in post–production with Gallner and Putnam. Skeggs summed it up best: “Adam can write in any style and any genre, and it’s always surprising coming from him. It’s always just about character and heart.”
For all its grime and fire–starting and middle fingers to the world, there’s something unshakably tender about Dinner in America. That’s what hit Gallner the most when he read the script. He has a wide acting range—indie dramas, horror cult classics, even Veronica Mars (if you were a Jennifer’s Body girlie, you definitely had a formative moment watching him as Colin Gray.) But Simon was different.
Gallner was used to playing unhinged characters, but this one was cranked up to 11 the entire time. The first few days on set, he’d go full throttle in a scene, only for Rehmeier to tell him, “More.” It took a while to adjust, to trust Adam to pull him back if needed, to let Simon’s chaos fully take over. But it was worth it. “Boot camp for the soul,” Gallner called it. “I left Dinner in America a changed man.”
For Skeggs, too, Patty wasn’t just a character—she was a version of herself that she’d been trying to reclaim. “This feels like I’m dipping into a part of my life where I had a lot of anxiety,” she said. “I definitely felt like Patty growing up. It was healing inner–child shit, falling back in love with that middle school version of myself that was so cringe but now she’s my hero. Because that’s Patty.”
That’s what makes Dinner in America stick. Simon and Patty don’t follow a redemptive arc of self–improvement. They don’t “grow” into better, more socially acceptable versions of themselves. They just are. And they find each other.
Skeggs walked away from Dinner in America with more confidence, Gallner with a newfound appreciation for full–throttle filmmaking. But more than anything, they left with the knowledge that they had made something that mattered to people.
“It’s not just me that feels healed by Patty and Simon,” Skeggs said. “It’s other people as well.”
She looked at Gallner, grinning. “I’m really overwhelmed with gratitude.”
Gallner, still shredding chicken offscreen: “Yeah.”
The day after Skeggs and Rehmeier met, he told her, “We’re going to write a song together.” She showed up with pages of stream–of–consciousness, Patty poetry—weird, messy, overly earnest.
She had been listening to Ezra Furman’s “Wobbly” on repeat, pulling inspiration from Furman’s lyrical freedom—how she plays with structure, how she fits words into places they normally wouldn’t belong. “I love that you pulled an Ezra Furman reference,” Skeggs told me, “because I love Ezra Furman so much. She just throws words in where they don’t ‘fit’—but they do.” That’s what “The Watermelon Song” became: a love song that was enough on its own, not clean or polished or made for anyone’s consumption.
The fact that Simon loves it—that he looks at Patty, wide–eyed and unfiltered, and gets it—is the entire point of Dinner in America.
And then there’s “My Kind of Woman” in the arcade scene.
The moment is intimate in a way that defies words. There’s no exposition, no grand romantic declaration—just Simon, Patty, and a shared reality that feels bigger than them. And a Whac–A–Mole machine—which, for the record, was not supposed to be there.
Putnam was obsessed with getting a Whac–A–Mole, but there wasn’t a single arcade in Metro Detroit that had one. So they shipped one in from Chicago. “We paid, like, a $1000 to get the Whac–A–Mole,” Rehmeier said. “The producers really wanted to make it work and surprised me with it, because I really wanted it.”
He laughed. “Nothing sounds as beautiful as Whac-A-Mole.”
Some movies come and go. Dinner in America sticks in your ribs. The movie has stayed with Gallner, maybe more than he realized. He kept quoting the same line to me during the interview, completely unprompted. “Why would you lie about Tanzania?” Three times. At least.
Skeggs, on the other hand, brought so much of herself into Patty. The gold sneakers Patty wears? Those belong to Skeggs—painted when she was 13. The stuffed animal in the Polaroid masturbation scene? That’s her childhood puppy. The old Polaroid collection Patty has? Skeggs actually collects them—just weird forgotten family pictures picked up from flea markets.
Rehmeier picked up on all these little quirks—the parts of Skeggs that she might have normally tucked away—and told her to, like Gallner, “Do it again. Play it up. Make it more.” She did, and it was freeing.
The first time she read the script, Dinner in America was pitched to her as a Napoleon Dynamite–adjacent movie. And that made sense. Napoleon Dynamite shaped her humor growing up. It was that kind of movie—something you watch at a formative age and hold onto.
Now, Dinner in America is having that impact on its own audience.
Somewhere between “My Kind of Woman” trending on TikTok, fan art, and covers of “The Watermelon Song” flooding YouTube, Dinner in America became a cult movie in real–time. It didn’t happen because of a massive marketing campaign or a studio push. It happened because its people found it.
Gallner smiled when he talked about that part. “It’s cool to just see people acknowledging that we aren’t crazy. That the way we felt about these characters? There’s something special about the movie. There’s something here, man.”
Rehmeier sees it too. People aren’t just watching the film—they’re creating because of it, making jewelry, clothes, and paintings, covering “The Watermelon Song” like it’s the new indie–girl anthem. It reminds him of how Nirvana changed things—how a whole generation picked up guitars because of them. And now, years later, Dinner in America is inspiring people in a different way.
It’s the ultimate full–circle moment: Simon and Patty making music in their own world, and now kids watching the film picking up guitars because of them.
Therefore, for all the intensity, Dinner in America was also one of the most fun experiences Gallner and Skeggs had ever had.
“I just remember laughing all the time,” Gallner said. “You [Skeggs] just made me laugh all the time as Patty. The ‘real magic’ bit? Nearly snapped my back.”
Skeggs grinned. “That line kills me too.”
“It wasn’t even a big scripted thing,” Gallner said. “But I say it all the time now. Like, in my real life.”
Skeggs agreed. “Even the days when Kyle was shooting with the Psyops band, I would just come in and watch. I missed you guys.”
The set was insane. Gallner had his car stolen. They rescued a pit bull. There were no budgets, no frills—just pure chaos. “We made it pretty fast, for no money, but it’s like cooking with love,” Gallner said. “The food tastes better.”
Rehmeier nodded. “It felt somber to close.”
Gallner put it best: “It wasn’t a crazy, joyful outro. It felt like coming out of a fever dream.”
And maybe that’s the best way to describe Dinner in America—a fever dream. Not the kind that jolts you awake in a panic, but the kind that lingers for days, surfacing in flashes. The sound of snow crunching under boots. The golden sneakers of a girl who was never meant to be the lead. The clatter of a Whac–A–Mole machine in the background of an unexpected love story.
And at the end of it all, you don’t leave the movie changed so much as seen. Maybe for the first time. Maybe for the only time.
And maybe that’s real magic.
