Blu-ray Review: Candy Apple

Blu-ray Release Date: Oct. 14, 2025
Director: Dean Dempsey
Price: Blu-ray $34.95
Studio: Anchor Bay

Dean Dempsey’s 2015 Candy Apple is a scrappy, bruised-knuckle love letter to the kind of New York that’s more nicotine than neon. Shot in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, the film follows Bobby (Dempsey), a struggling artist barely holding it together, and his father Texas Trash (played by Dempsey’s real-life dad), a washed-up drifter who lands on his son’s couch after he’s drained all his options out west. Together they navigate a city teeming with hustlers, junkies, and dreamers, clinging to their own shaky ambitions as the streets threaten to swallow them whole.

There’s a ragged poetry to Dempsey’s direction of the independent comedy-drama—grimy and handheld, but strangely tender. The performances, including lively turns from Neon Music as the wary but loyal Roxy and NYC scenester Sophia Lamar as the enigmatic Lady, give the film its rough glamour. Everyone seems to be playing some version of themselves, which only adds to the film’s vérité charge. The city itself becomes a character: dirty, alive, and mercilessly honest.

In spirit, Candy Apple recalls Midnight Cowboy and the underground grit of Paul Morrissey’s Trash. It’s a howl from the margins—funny, flawed, and oddly beautiful. Like New York itself, it’s both decaying and full of dangerous, intoxicating life.