Martin Brest made this first feature at around the same time and under the same American Film Institute auspices as David Lynch made "Eraserhead." Both earned them Hollywood careers, although the latter movie is still very much a part of our culture, whereas "Hot Tomorrows" has always been hard to see. Turns out there a reason for that--there's really not much of a movie here, although you can see some enterprise and formative talent. Ken Lerner plays Michael, the classic movie "writer" who apparently can only "write about what he knows" (his Jewish NYC family background, which we glimpse in flashbacks). He's scraping by in L.A., hanging out with childhood friend Louis (Ray Sharkey), who came to visit and hasn't left, perhaps because he has no identity beyond being Michael's pal.
Capturing a few Christmas Eve hours they spend together, "Hot Tomorrows" doesn't have much plot. It has a hook--Michael is obsessed with death--but until the finale, that isn't really developed, beyond the film being shot in some interesting locations that give you a feel for the semi-abandoned places of a Los Angeles past. Laurel & Hardy clips near the beginning and end suggest how we're supposed to view the lead characters, but frankly Michael is a glum blank and Louis is an annoyingly one-note stooge, despite Sharkey's energetic performance. They go to a nightclub that's empty but for a retro stage show (performed by Danny Elfman & other members of Oingo Boingo when they were a theatre troupe rather than a rock band), plus sole other patrons Tony (Victor Argo), a fellow New Yorker who befriends them, and his ornery drunk companion Alberict (Herve Villechaize, who livens things up before his character passes out). Not much else happens before a climax that is startling not just because it leaps into fantasy, but because it's on such a larger scale than everything prior to it, paying homage to 1930s musical production numbers.
That running current of movie nostalgia combined with the shaggy character comedy here places "Hot Tomorrow" somewhere between Curt McDowell's features and early Jim Jarmusch. It just doesn't have much of a script, though, or good dialogue, so the quirkiness of the personalities and situations feel limply half-baked. Even at 73 minutes, this feels like heavy padding of material that would have better suited a 20-minute short. Still, in 1977 independent cinema of this sort (as opposed to the drive-in exploitation kind) barely existed, and you can see why the film struck some as offbeat and original enough to springboard some of its participants into more mainstream careers.
