Muscle Beach: An Indie Film Set in the Faded Bodybuilding Mecca

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The indie movie Muscle Beach is a low-key hybrid charmer, a loose crime drama built around documentary footage of Venice Beach and its carnival atmosphere.

The story — which writer-director Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman says was inspired by the 1949 Carol Reed noir, The Third Man — stars the genial 6-foot, seven-inch, 250-pound gentle giant Ike Catcher as Abe, a bodybuilder returning to Venice’s Muscle Beach after an unsuccessful foray in Hollywood, looking for an old friend.

Over the course of a day, Abe tries to reconnect with Jay (Farley Jackson), his old lifting partner and roommate who he ghosted a year ago in a single-minded effort to pursue his big-screen career. Abe roams the Ocean Mile Walk and the beach, talking to various people working in lunch trucks as well as supplement hawkers, T-shirt sellers, a bodybuilding competition sponsor (Reservoir Dogs’ Kirk Baltz), and Alice (Lindsey Normington), Jay’s ex and mother of his child.

Meanwhile, he keeps running into an undercover cop investigating a mysterious rash of overdoses from tainted supplements among the weightlifters who frequent the beach. One of those who succumbs to the bad drugs is Abe’s friend FreeTop, played by 4-foot, three-inch bodybuilder and Instagram influencer Kewon Vines.

The camera captures the social buzz of the place — including the entirety of a guitar-playing busker’s performance — while suggesting just a little of its seediness. As day turns to night, the sunny naturalism transforms into noirish neon-lit paranoia.

Throughout, we have vintage clips of bodybuilding films mixed with Abe’s not-so-deep thoughts (“Life is one of the hardest modes of being”) and insights about the “blissful solitude” of body sculpting, which he compares to building your own video game character.

In the end, Muscle Beach offers no big surprises. The functional plot involving Jay’s absence, sociopathic developers and tainted drugs could serve as a script for a vintage Baywatch or Law & Order episode.

But the subject touches on the real-world state of Venice, once the domain of painters, musicians and Beat Generation artists, now a community characterized by high-priced real estate, stagnant development, and chronic homelessness.

The film’s deeper appeal is about the afterglow of a faded popular subculture (think of Ron Mann’s documentaries on free jazz, comic books and van painting). The name “Muscle Beach” is probably best known from the 1964 musical comedy Muscle Beach Party, the second in the seven Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello beach movies, about a group of weightlifters attempting to take over a gang’s primo Malibu surfing area.

There’s also a famous 1948 lyrical short, Muscle Beach, co-directed by future Oscar winner Joseph Strick. That film focused on the original Muscle Beach near the Santa Monica Pier, a New Deal work project which provided gymnastic equipment for the public’s use and which helped launch the global fitness movement.

The second Muscle Beach — an open-air fenced gym, where the movie is partially set — was built in the 1950s two miles south of the original site. In the 70s and 80s it was frequented by such stars as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, where celebrity bodies could, as Abe puts it in the film, “flex for the people.”

Muscle Beach. Written and directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman. Starring Ike Catcher, Kirk Baltz, Lindsay Normington, and Kewon Vines. Muscle Beach reaches the last stop of its two-month roadshow tour in Toronto at the Paradise Theatre on May 30, 6:30 pm with a director Q&A hosted by Canadian producer Eastern Yoo.