19 Years Later, Gregg Araki's Only Comedy is Already Aging Like Fine Wine

Published Jul 29, 2026, 5:08 AM EDT Anthony Crislip has always loved movies and television, and has been published in outlets such as SlashFilm and Ultimate Classic Rock. While working as a film programmer or judge at a film festival, he has striven to develop interest in underseen films. He is a particular fan of digging deep into forgotten corners of film history. Gregg Araki’s 2007 film Smiley Face is one of the great stoner comedies — and perhaps the greatest stoner comedy that you've never heard of. As is true of the best films of the subgenre, like Half Baked or How High, the movie is absurd, conspiratorial, and even experimental while depicting the stoned state of mind — in large part because of an outstanding lead performance by the great Anna Faris. While Araki will probably always be best known for the series of transgressive, in-your-face DIY queer films he made in the ‘90s, movies like Smiley Face show that he also had the capacity to make a John Waters-esque move to the world of mainstream filmmaking. While his style can sometimes feel cheap or laid-back, it makes the laughter come naturally. With Smiley Face, you see that even in its opening titles, which look like psychedelic flash animation, and properly set the tone. Jane (Faris) is overwhelmed from the very start of the movie. The stresses of an upcoming audition, her domineering and nerdy roommate Steve (Danny Masterson) demanding she pay the power bill, and her being extremely high all combine to leave her profoundly confused. Araki’s camera compounds this with slow zooms onto the things that are stressing her out, funky dissolves, dialogue that goes nowhere, and close-ups on Faris’ face that clearly demonstrate her inability to keep up. Because the movie is a fairly straightforward comedy, Jane is maybe less troubled than many of Araki’s protagonists. But that doesn’t mean she has an easy time of it. Gregg Araki's Career Moved From '90s Icon to Beloved Auteur Image via First Look International Gregg Araki’s filmmaking career began in the 1980s, with extremely low-budget movies dealing primarily with off-beat plots, queer themes, and characters representing the kind of outsider communities he knew well. Working on films that cost less than a used car, he used whatever tools he had at his disposal to make movies in this spirit, culminating with 1992's brilliant The Living End. His Teenage Apocalypse trilogy — Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere — of the 1990s took it to the next level, while not losing the anarchic queer spirit that made those initial movies special. Working on those movies also gave successful actors a certain credibility; a laundry list of cool ‘90s performers like Parker Posey, Heather Graham, and Ryan Phillipe gave the movies a built-in audience. Still, Araki operated with ingenuity and creativity, never making movies that felt bland or square — a trend he is continuing with 2026’s I Want Your Sex. Araki’s career continued to move more into the mainstream as time went on, leading to 2004’s beautiful and heavy Mysterious Skin, which cast Joseph Gordon Levitt and future Brutalist director Brady Corbet in a strange drama of alien abduction and child abuse. Smiley Face was practically the inverse of Mysterious Skin, less a saga of trauma and stunted development and more a singular odyssey of one woman as she attempts to deal with everything. Specifically, to get money to pay off her dealer (Adam Brody, in another of the director’s inspired teen idol casting choices) at “Hempfest” in Venice Beach. 'Smiley Face' Has a Great Anna Faris Performance Smiley Face is the story of best-laid plans gone awry, paranoia, and gracelessness under pressure: Jane is fundamentally incapable of surviving the difficult mess in which she’s found herself, trying to get money and more weed at the same time. Drawing smiley faces in the air, she mostly finds pockets of comfort so she can then freak out. And Anna Faris, who had proven her comedy chops with the first three Scary Movies (besides being far and away the best part of the 2006 Ryan Reynolds rom-com Just Friends), gets to essentially run the movie at her own stoned performance pace; her excitedly telling an LA bus driver that it will be her first time taking the bus is just one example. But her attempt to sell some of her “government weed” to the casting director (Jane Lynch) at her audition is even better, as is her relationship with an against-type John Krasinski. For as much as Smiley Face is operating in the world of stoner comedy logic, it’s also very funny on its own. The movie is a journey into the underworld, with a plot that hangs on loosely to the action in favor of more bits and weed jokes before they became codified by the Judd Apatow school of comedy. Smiley Face is a bit of a comedy of errors, like a sunny West Coast version of the Martin Scorsese classic After Hours (complete with an angry mob of people damaged by the hero), and Faris’ performance even has a bit of Griffin Dunne in it too, with a childlike panic at the slightest provocation. While it didn’t quite become a Gregg Araki cult classic, it’s still uniformly funny. Smiley Face is available for free on Tubi.