If, God forbid, there is a natural disaster in Los Angeles in the near future, Jena Malone could be one of your first responses.
“I've been studying Community Emergency Response Team training,” the actor and musician, 41, said over coffee in the living room of his home overlooking pomegranate trees and a canyon in northeast Los Angeles. “Whether it's managing fires or building a neighborhood tool shed, it's now less important to me to reach professional milestones than it is to transform the way I live on this planet. Let's build something where we all take care of each other's needs through mutual aid.”
Those are the galvanizing priorities of Malone, who has helmed generationally beloved films like the sci-fi noir “Donnie Darko,” played axe-slinging Johanna Mason in two “Hunger Games” tentpoles and recently co-starred in the lesbian bodybuilding revenge film “Love Lies Bleeding.” For almost as long, he's also made experimental and electronic folk records that play with avant-garde noise and quietly soulful songwriting.
This is a wild time in Los Angeles for anyone concerned about the city and its cultural industries, and Malone is deeply involved in both. Just before the release of his new Netflix series, “The Boroughs,” produced by the Duffer Brothers, he released his first album in almost a decade. “Flowers For Men” is a mangled, primitive effects record from the future, written after the birth of her son upended her obligations (and expectations) to the men in her life and the world they will inherit.
“It changed everything,” Malone said of raising a son. “I grew up learning to thrive and mask myself in masculine spaces. Routine culture is a masculine toxicity that I inherited and became indoctrinated into. But fatherhood gives you this opportunity to burn your entire life in sacrifice to discover what's real. I had no idea what it was like to be a man. All my ideas were burned and not much came back.”
For millennial film fans, Malone has been a consistently compelling and reliable actress since her child star role in 1997's “Contact.” Few embody a tortured and seductive American culture like she does.
“The Boroughs” – a high-profile follow-up to “Stranger Things” from the masters of unreality, created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews – has a packed cast including Alfred Molina, Geena Davis and Bill Pullman, set amid a bucolic retirement community under supernatural threat. A ragtag group of misfits from the Duffer brothers coming together to fight supernatural horror could be the last safe bet on television.
Yet that's also how Malone feels about Hollywood's current climate: a once-stable neighborhood fending off evil forces. Institutional consolidation and retreat, spiraling costs and technological upheaval—they all add up to a growing sense that an era has ended and the worst is yet to come.
“Cinema is in a very delicate transition. I think that where music was 20 years ago, cinema is now,” he said. “It's like being in an elevator where every floor is on fire. Many of the things I loved no longer exist, even if what I love is still tremendously powerful. My stress levels go down and my creativity increases when I'm building a world that doesn't depend on the film industry, even though it's my main love.”
That feeling called her to return to music on “Flowers For Men,” nine years after her last LP. The harrowing experience of giving birth in 2016 and raising a son sparked reflections on what the inner lives of men were really like, and she wanted to write about them.
“I was raised by two mothers and had this strange aspiration of becoming a father,” Malone said, laughing. “At that time I was the breadwinner of my family. But being a father was completely new for me. I still saw my father in him, my grandfather, those old relationships with men. He asked me to look at him with curious, childish eyes.”
“Flowers For Men” was written out of a sincere curiosity about the restrictions, bad influences and best aspirations of men. To inhabit someone else's life, she had to sound different too.
“Film is in a very delicate transition. I think where music was 20 years ago, film is now,” Malone said. “It's like being in an elevator where every floor is on fire. Many of the things I loved no longer exist, even if what I love is still tremendously powerful.
(Evan reflecting/for The Times)
The album's highlight is its layers of vocal treatments. Malone has a lovely natural voice, intimately whispered, with hints of '70s country rock. But here he sprays it with pitch-shifted digital acid, like a late-2000s R&B record thrown into the Joshua Tree Inn pool.
It's an odd combination, but it brings modern melancholy to “Barstow,” which has the narrative structure of a Townes Van Zandt hit but is corroded by blurry effects. “Create In Your Name” has a nocturnal darkness worthy of Billie Eilish, with lyrics so devotional they almost sound consumptive. “Disaster Zones” has a spectacular atmosphere and the LP closes with a spectacular version of John Prine's classic “Angel From Montgomery.”
“I love that a man wrote a song where the first line is 'I'm an old woman,'” Malone said. “As a songwriter, it gives me a lot of permission. Now all the doors are open. If I had to give flowers to all the different men who have touched or changed things that deserve celebration, John Prine would be one of them.”
That idea (celebrating men for the good they are capable of doing) seemed transgressive enough today to give coherence to the album. But questions also arose about how the romantic relationship fits into his life. As she adjusted to motherhood, she read about relationship anarchy, which she believes does not respect levels of connection. She bought books on ethical non-monogamy (“Sex at Dawn” was a big one) to learn that other lives were not only possible, but perhaps even more fulfilling.
(Perhaps this wasn't a stretch for an actor who played wild child Lydia Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.”)
“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, putting a partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that mentioned that,” he said. “But as I learn to care for this child, I realize that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that feels like another love. And then my family and how important friends were. And suddenly there is no world where I can have just one love, not even a romantic love.”
“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, placing a partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that mentioned that,” Malone said. “But as I learn to care for this child, I realize that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that feels like another love.
(Evan reflecting/for The Times)
“Flowers For Men” is, in its own way, a deal with that contradiction: loving men deeply, but never putting them above all else, even when she got engaged to her partner, actor Jack Buckley, earlier this year.
He is still deciding how to present this album live. She said she's a fan of the Dead City Punx model of renegade shows in forgotten corners of Los Angeles. Maybe, when the city seems to be falling apart, you'll find a leafy park or the back of a dingy bar that's the right home for these strange, lonely but hopeful songs.
“I want someone to walk into the bathroom and say, 'Wow, why is there a woman singing to me?'” Malone said. “I like the idea that art makes you a little uncomfortable and you don't have the expectations that you used to have of knowing how to sustain it.”
