Our series on the best stoner movies ever made (that you can stream right now) introduces the patron saint of stoner cinema, Harmony Korine
Probably every Harmony Korine movie, from his debuts Kids (1995, as writer) and Gummo (1997, as director) through recent ones like his Twitch-stream-as-trance-film AI-experiment Baby Invasion (2025), qualifies as stoner cinema in some way or another. But the pair of Florida films he made in the 2010s get much higher than the rest. The first part of that diptych, Spring Breakers (2013), is probably the most blunted movie this side of Belly (1998), and will surely be featured in a future entry of Streaming for Stoners, too. But for now we hazily focus on Korine’s second Florida movie, The Beach Bum (2019), a first-ballot entry in the future TJM Stoner Movie Hall of Flames.
The protagonist of this particular odyssey is Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), a Florida Keys-based poet/novelist (with notable similarities to poet/novelist Richard Brautigan), who’s facing a series of potentially life-changing crises (marital, professional, and more), absolutely none of which succeed in harshing the movie’s vibe. The movie’s story is on some level a joke by itself, constantly presenting scenes that suggest the characters will grow or achieve some kind of resolution, and then never getting there.
Those crisis scenes include the death of his exuberantly wealthy partner Minnie (Isla Fisher), which leads to a mourning period that is also, of course, a bender, ending up with Moondog in a court-ordered rehab facility from which he quickly escapes with the help of a Christian-rock enthusiast (Zac Efron), putting him on the lam until he’s eventually working a job on the boat of dolphin-tour leader Captain Wack (Martin Lawrence), before finally escaping authorities for good with the help of friends including Jimmy Buffett (as himself) and a cuckolding weed dealer named Lingerie (Snoop Dogg).
So The Beach Bum goes a lotta places, but Moondog doesn’t learn shit, and the movie doesn’t expect you to, either. So where most comedy films, and even most stoner films, aim to indulge us with catharsis… hitting us with the boring parts where the characters grow up, learn their lessons, and stop getting quite so high, or something (we’re looking at you, Knocked Up)… The Beach Bum instead remains defiantly committed to its depiction of hedonistic pleasure. In another post of Streaming for Stoners, we crowned Inherent Vice as the capstone of the stoner film subgenre. Maybe that makes The Beach Bum like the joint you smoke with the professor a couple months after you graduate (which reminds me, someday we’re gonna have to do Animal House, too…)
