XOXO: how to make a movie for the under-20s

Youth culture has never been easier to ignore. Tucked away in the walled gardens of social networking apps and at mass gatherings organised without the need for a single print advertisement, the cultural habits of those born this side of Definitely Maybe are invisible to all but the most switched-on (or, depending on your perspective, overfamiliar) of adults.

The EDM boom, for instance, may have reshaped club culture into a billion-dollar US industry, but it’s not something that non-millennials know much about, beyond a hazy awareness that Justin Bieber no longer puts out tracks like Baby. Consider the fate that befell last year’s Zac Efron-starring EDM drama We Are Your Friends. Distributed under the assumption that mom and dad were just as keen on Deadmau5 as little Jimmy, it became one of the worst-grossing films ever to be released on more than 2,000 US cinema screens.

That fiasco apparently wasn’t enough to derail XOXO, a Netflix Original movie touted by its director as a Dazed And Confused for the contemporary PLUR set. Shot last year with a number of real festivals standing in for the fictional EDM Mecca of its title, the film follows six supposedly diverse but functionally interchangeable ravers as their lives intersect over the course of One Fateful Night™. Front and centre is fledgling DJ Ethan Shaw, for whom the festival represents a chance to make good on the rapturous online response to his blandly euphoric breakthrough single All I Ever Wanted.

With problems so trivial that they can be entirely resolved in the space of a single evening, the film’s central characters don’t make much of an impression, but the film itself is not without its energetic charms. Saturated in neon, gratifyingly loud, and a wonderful showcase for charismatic supporting actor Brett DelBuono, you can certainly imagine XOXO finding an audience with the post-SpongeBob, pre-Orange Is The New Black demographic Netflix now seems so keen to seduce.

Not that we’ll ever know what they make of it. Having launched the film without a cinema release, Netflix has upturned what it means to peddle a movie to teenagers, focusing on word-of-mouth instead of market saturation. Thanks to its refusal to share viewing figures, only the company’s execs can say whether this strategy is working, but it’s certainly a mode of distribution that suits today’s youth culture down to the ground – one that renders the film invisible to everyone but the under-20s.