By Tim Jackson

Edie Arnold Is a Loser is a divinely idiotic punk-rock Catholic-school comedy: sweet, predictable, outrageous, mildly blasphemous—and infectious.

A scene from Edie Arnold Is a Loser.

Edie Arnold Is a Loser, a scrappy independent film directed by Megan Rico and Kade Atwood, takes a familiar premise—a girl at a strict all-girls Catholic school finds salvation in punk rock—and cranks every cliché to gleeful excess.

The title character, Edie, is one of the uncool girls, hanging out with three other outcasts known as the “turds.” Newcomer Adi Madden Cabrera’s restrained performance provides a deadpan counterpoint to McKenna Tuckett’s gloriously outsized turn as Edie’s best friend, Frances, who wears orthodontic headgear. One night, Edie and Frances slip off school grounds for a local punk show, where the house band’s thrashing antics offer a flash of liberation. Edie, already a drummer in the school music program, and Frances, often found half-asleep at the church organ, decide—with considerable encouragement from Frances’s wild enthusiasm—that this is where their talents might shine.

Joined by two friends, they form a quartet to compete in amateur punk night at a local club. The fact that the other girls cannot actually play their instruments neither dampens their eagerness nor impedes the plot. They call themselves NunDead. You may think you can predict the ending, but a final long shot delivers one more ridiculous revelation.

I saw the film at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival and fell for its “let’s go for it” spirit, so I spoke with Atwood about how it came together. He and writer-director Rico had originally planned another movie, but financing became a challenge. They wanted to shoot something—anything. “Keep working” was the mantra. Rico already had a script, so they took a chance. With smart location scouting and clever casting, they shot the film “pretty much as it was written” in only 10 days.

That compressed schedule registers in the performances’ infectious energy and the film’s headlong pacing. Edie Arnold Is a Loser makes no apology for its eye-rolling moments. There was little time to worry about whether the performances were on an even keel, every joke would land, or the period and setting entirely cohered. Overacting was plainly not discouraged. “We never expected the great reaction the film has been getting,” Atwood says. A truly independent production, he adds, frees filmmakers to make intuitive choices without corporate oversight.

The filmmakers’ comic instincts are apparent in the film’s rhythms as well as its casting. Cabrera did not initially seem the obvious choice for Edie, but chemistry reads with Tuckett revealed a potent comic pairing. Veteran character actress Star Herrmann—the wife of the late actor Edward Herrmann—chews the scenery as Sister Myra, who lectures the girls about the evils of “weed” and “oral sex” while the cool girls giggle knowingly. Her gloriously hammy performance contrasts with Luseane Pasa’s more restrained Sister Sheena, the school’s comparatively permissive nun. Pasa, Atwood says, “was always the go-to for expressions we needed.”

Cherish Rodriguez plays Edie’s mother, who objects to her daughter’s punk ambitions but seems to harbor a cougar crush on Edie’s date, the hunky blond choirboy Walter Boyd. With a mouth full of pious affirmations, Walter is certain to reveal his inner bro. Arms crossed and hands tucked beneath his armpits, actor Lucas Van Orden drew some of my biggest laughs. “He was so committed, we didn’t know if he was really like that,” Atwood says, “until the end, when he revealed himself as a really nice guy.”

Somewhere between Pee-wee Herman and John Waters, Edie Arnold Is a Loser gets by on broad staging, shameless overacting, comic sound effects, and hand-drawn animated overlays. The acting styles seem to have wandered in from different movies; that is part of the fun. Character development is nil, but the movie’s messy, can-do exuberance carries it through. I was also pleased that Cabrera’s drumming—learned for the film—was in sync with the visuals, always a bugaboo for me.

The soundtrack includes music by X-Ray Spex, whose late singer Poly Styrene also wore braces and bears a passing resemblance to Tuckett’s character. Atwood says the resemblance is “just a coincidence.” There is also a killer punk rendition of the hymn “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” that I cannot get out of my head.

The Somerville Theatre will screen Edie Arnold Is a Loser—a 73-minute, PG-13 independent comedy—on October 4, at 7 p.m. in its Main Theatre. The film is being independently released by its filmmakers.

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed four feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater, which is about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story, and Marblehead Morning: Daring & Stahl: 50 Years in Harmony. He has made two short films as well: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his substack.