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Love Streams: What Film is For

Love Streams: What Film is For

Last updated on: July 18, 2026 at 11:59 am by Chase Padusniak

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Love Streams: What Film is For 2026-07-18T11:59:26-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
Source: Flickr user Jon Rubin
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In a TV documentary about the production of Love Streams (1984), writer-director John Cassavetes says most movies bore him. He has, he confesses, no interest in entertainment, in being pacified. A one-off about “pizzazz” and “adding more to keep the audience interested” briefly turned my mind to “second-screen writing” now so common for streaming services. Cassavetes would hate what film has become (and hated what it was then). Love Streams, probably his last great work, demonstrates this disdain admirably.

I first saw the movie when I was too young (many such cases). At that age, no matter my perceived maturity, I still wore graphic t-shirts with crude jokes on them, or, if a little late, slim fit Forever 21 cardigans. I wanted entertainment, even if I didn’t know it. Of course, I knew I was supposed to like the movie, and I did. Whatever that meant to be me at the time. But I found it confusing, impressionistic. Really, too much like life.

In the same documentary, Cassavetes’ wife Gena Rowlands, who also plays one of the main characters, says something a bit obvious for Cassavetes fans with particular relevance to Love Streams. She and her husband don’t think his characters are insane; they’re just looking for a way to love and survive in life. His characters may appear insane, at best eccentric, but they are no madder than anyone else. The older I get, the more this perspective seems like the right one to me.

In Love Streams, for example, we have two siblings: Sarah (Gena Rowlands) and Robert (John Cassavetes). He is a lonely writer and playboy, who seems to attract women with his sheer pathetic degeneracy. Thus, early on his harasses a club singer into letting her drunkenly drive him home. He falls down her stairs and wakes up, cared for tenderly by her mother. He gives his long-lost eight-year-old son beer and flies him to Vegas, where he gets drunk with prostitutes. Robert hates men, hates himself. He pushes everyone away.

Sarah faces a divorce. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals for years. She loves her family dearly, probably to the point of suffocation. She travels to Europe with dozens of pieces of luggage, shows up on her rich brother’s doorstep with nary a word. In her grief, she buys goats, ducks, miniature horses, and a dog named Jim. She thinks these will heal her pained brother. In a way, she is right.

There is no plot here, only two lost people who, in a lesser film, would form an easy opposition. Her loneliness comes from pouring herself out, his stems from holding others at bay. This is true, but it’s too simple. Their loneliness is mutually entwined and independent. We know nothing of their childhoods or their backgrounds—it’s all a blur, an indistinct muddle. You know—life.

Cassavetes understood this. So, the movie ends, ends with a parting, harsh rain, and jukebox lights. John Cassavetes, barely legible, streaked in color in a windowpane.

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