The name Duplass has become so synonymous with indie filmmaking, and Jay’s fingers (along with brother Mark) have found themselves in so many different pots, that it’s easy to forget that his last movie as director was 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathlon. It’s more surprising that a Duplass movie hasn’t come out since then. Perhaps in another era, Mark and Jay would be churning them out on a yearly basis, but in our increasingly fractured media environment, you take what you can get: a TV show here, a documentary there, an executive producer credit on 50-some other properties in between. It’s a bit hard to precisely dub The Baltimorons a return to form for Jay, flying solo here, because it’s unclear how long he’ll stick around, but what is clear is that he’s lost none of his homespun charm.
Of course, charm alone does not a movie make, and it’s not evident that a whole lot more has been developed in the intervening years. The Baltimorons features the same jittery aesthetic; the same soft-boiled banter; the same shenanigans and low-frequency characters. It also resembles another sleeper holiday dramedy, The Holdovers, from which it at times seems to take like a rummage sale. The Holdovers walked backwards into its yuletide, odd-couple dynamic, or at least gave the impression that it did, and inverted Alexander Payne’s curmudgeonly attitude to dazzling effect. The Baltimorons feels eager to please as it shoves two eccentrics into the same space at Christmastime.
The eccentrics in question here are Cliff (Michael Strassner) and Didi (Liz Larsen), a semi-canceled improv comedian and dentist, respectively. Because he lost a tooth walking absent-mindedly into his fiancée’s mother’s doorway, Cliff requires the medical expertise Didi offers, and, through a series of all-too-neatly contrived coincidences, they end up gallivanting across Baltimore on Christmas Eve and sparking a July-November romance. However convenient the script proves at bringing these two together and sending them on their nocturnal adventure, the relationship at the center is unimpeachable and by far the best thing The Baltimorons has going for it: driven by lived-in performances, the bond between the two of them is totally believable. But the movie also doesn’t ramble enough for a true character-driven story to take full shape around this dynamic center. Things are just a little too nice, the emotions a little too telegraphed, the narrative a little too controlled.
We all know a guy like Cliff: chatty, performatively gregarious, uses humor as a coping mechanism for his myriad mental health struggles. Maybe we’ve even been that guy. Nevertheless, that guy can be super annoying. Duplass never lets Cliff veer into full Wanda or Frownland unlikability, which, for better or worse, at least would have gone a long way in substantiating the movie’s verisimilitude. Instead, he’s just a big goofy oaf, which is perfectly fair enough, but Duplass strains a bit to upsell his charm. (The film was co-written by Strassner.) Didi fares better, mostly coming to life thanks to Larsen’s wry, luminous smile in cutaways. Because of her, small moments of power accumulate; simply watching the process of Didi warming up to Cliff is great fun. But for a movie about a man spiraling out of control, The Baltimorons never quite lights the unruly spark it needs. It yes-ands from one scene to the next, relies too heavily on the Christmas vibe for pathos, and commits the cardinal faux pas of being about a comedian.
Indeed, we’re so oversaturated with media about how hard it is to be a comedian (some of which, like Lady Dynamite, is admittedly quite good) that a movie needs to do something really special to warrant including it as a plot mechanism. In The Baltimorons, this thread largely takes a backseat to the present-tense dillydallying Cliff is using to distract himself from his failures, but when it does come up, Duplass unexpectedly knows what to do with it. The Baltimorons has one great scene, and it is indeed a showstopper. Cliff and Didi stumble their way into a pop-up improv show held at an auto shop. Cliff, nervous as hell, is coerced into performing his locally legendary sketch “The Baltimorons,” but no one will volunteer to be his partner. Didi, after some hemming and hawing, steps up onstage with him. What follows is some of the richest, most self-lacerating work Duplass has ever delivered. The tension is sticky with sweat: Cliff hasn’t performed in months, and he breaks character often to chastise Didi for not getting with the program. Didi, unfazed, barrels through and wins the crowd over. It’s a perfect microcosm of their individual sensibilities, a high-wire encapsulation of how valuable it can be to work through your problems in art, and maybe a bit of an autobiographical insert from a director getting behind the camera for the first time in ages. It’s one of the most honest and searing scenes of the year, and it alone makes The Baltimorons worth the cost of admission.
If it culminated in the improv scene, The Baltimorons would have earned its stabs at saccharine whimsy, creating a riptide effect and revealing a more complicated side to Cliff. But Duplass instead plops this scene right in the film’s middle, and the back half of the movie suffers as a result. The rest of the runtime is spent underlining what we already saw in the centerpiece, doing everything in its power not to say the words “life is improv” outright and vindicating fears that a movie about a comedian generally falls to the mercy of the trite. But for a shining moment, it gets so damn close to all the way working. The Balitmorons wears its modesty well, and it’s an admirably big-hearted movie; Duplass simply would’ve been better off leaning away from the cuteness and toward the scintillating drama that shows its face all too briefly. A movie about human beings — yes, even comedians — working through their problems is enough. It is, in fact, worthy of celebration.
DIRECTOR: Jay Duplass; CAST: Michael Strassner, Liz Larsen, Olivia Luccardi, Chris Strassner; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: September 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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