Michael Angarano’s Sacramento carries through it a familiar refrain of millennial angst and light comedy, exploring themes of anxiety about adulthood, personal loss, and dashed expectations. It’s an enticing foundation for an original dramedy geared toward adults, made all the more appealing because of its cast, led by director and co-writer, Michael Angarano, and Michael Cera as estranged childhood friends, Ricky and Glenn, who reunite at personal crossroads that they’re ill-equipped to face alone; and supported by Kristen Stewart and Maya Erskine as partners (in differing capacities) to Glenn and Ricky, respectively.
The four of them make an extremely capable and charming quartet, whose collective body of work over the past 15 years — from Sky High and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, to Twilight and Pen15 — has played a part in defining the millennial generation’s cultural footprint. It’s disappointing, then, that the characters sketched out in Angarano and Christopher Nicholas Smith’s original screenplay are either too vague or schematic to feel real.
That story, about the reunion of two estranged friends at very different points in their lives — one in the midst of, but anxious over, his expectant fatherhood; the other wayward and floundering, afraid to admit that he has nowhere to go — who go on a life-changing road trip, recalls Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy. But where that gem of male insecurity and economic and domestic anxiety was a masterclass in narrative economy and psychological ambiguity, Sacramento is at odds between withholding information for dramatic impact and over-pathologizing for fear of misinterpretation.
We meet Ricky during a solo camping trip in Northern California. A woman across the lake sees him napping in the buff and compliments his dick. Her name is Tallie, and their off-kilter meet-cute forms the basis for a charming weekend fling, during which they enjoy each other’s company, but ultimately decide they have nothing in common, especially in their capacity to commit to plans, and go their separate ways.
A year later, after being all but kicked out of a convalescent home where he was grieving his father’s death, Ricky shows up at Glenn’s house unannounced. Glenn, an acutely anxious expectant father, ducks behind kitchen counters and walls like Bilbo Baggins avoiding his lecherous relatives, whispering frantically to his pregnant wife, Rosie (Stewart), that he doesn’t want to see him. He’s been effectively phasing Ricky out of his life for years, agreeing to lunches on rare occasions, but otherwise trying to sever their relationship.
Ricky and Glenn’s reunion is at once awkward and sweet. Their underlying love for each other is masked by degrees of masculine insecurity and competitive sparring — at one point, they find themselves doing pushups in Glenn’s backyard. Ricky suggests a spontaneous trip to Sacramento, and Glenn agrees, hoping to call Ricky’s bluff, but it’s Glenn who gives in at their first rest stop, and tells Ricky he wants to go home. Ricky comes clean that he needs to go to Sacramento to spread his dead father’s ashes. Feeling guilty, and believing he can offer some kind of help to his struggling friend, Glenn agrees to keep going.
Ricky and Glenn’s competing lies — the former hasn’t been completely truthful about his father’s death or the real reason he wants to go to Sacramento, and the latter hasn’t mentioned his impending fatherhood — put a passive-aggressive strain on their dynamic that eventually unmasks their latent arrested development. Each man-child is either in denial about their own shortcomings as adults or has difficulty being upfront about their struggles. At the same time, they’re convinced of their own moral superiority over the other, that they’re capable of, and indeed responsible for, helping the other make a personal breakthrough — which might secretly make them feel better about themselves.
Angarano and Cera’s performances chart the disintegration and repair of their relationship with ease, so much so that the script’s tendency to have them bluntly verbalize its themes is almost entirely unnecessary. Erskine, in a role that sees her disappear from the story for a majority of the film, fares as well as could be expected with the clunky material she’s given, the most jarring of which is distilled in a monologue that poses her character less as the real, struggling-but-coping single mother she is, and more as a vessel for the script’s tendency toward male-feminist apologia. As Ricky struggles to articulate his ambiguous desire to be a part of Tallie’s, and his new son’s, life, and while Tallie herself breaks down into exhausted tears, he comes across as Angarano and Smith’s self-aware attempts to criticize his gender’s shortcomings while simultaneously positioning themselves as exceptions.
In the end, the film is more glaringly, though perhaps unintentionally, about the perpetual coddling of emotionally stunted grown men by the women in their lives, and Stewart’s Rosie is the epitome of this theme. Her character is there, essentially, to be a sounding board for Glenn’s anxieties, but with nothing significant, or even meaningful, to do plot-wise, Rosie is instead imbued by Angarano, Smith, and even Stewart, with the most thinly-concealed contempt. For how frustrating, even annyong, Glenn’s anxiety-induced quirks tend to be, it’s a baffling choice by all parties involved, and makes Stewart, an actor known in her post-Twilight career for good taste, look like a complete chump. But perhaps when your ex-girlfriend is the finance-attracting Kristen Stewart, it’s easier to convince her to accept a role that likely took no longer than four days to shoot than it is to take a few more comprehensive swipes at your script’s shortcomings.
DIRECTOR: Michael Angarano; CAST: Michael Cera, Michael Angarano, Kristen Stewart, Maya Erskine; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: April 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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