“Hey Mom, did you feel emotional the first time you drove in Sacramento?” asked Saoirse Ronan’s titular character in “Lady Bird” during an impassioned final monologue that makes the streets of the Californian capital glow. The city provides a similar site of reconciliation between a pair who’s grown gradually estranged in Michael Angarano’s “Sacramento.” It feels emotional, too, albeit in a more familiar way.
That’s not necessarily a knock on the film. Angarano’s script, which he co-wrote with friend Chris Smith, never feels generic because it’s so generationally specific. Without being obsessive about incorporating timely markers, “Sacramento” clearly feels like a work about millennial males in their mid-thirties. Concerns about fatherhood dominate this life stage for men, both in terms of losing their own dads and becoming ones themselves.
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Those anxieties filter into the main characters, Angarano’s flighty Rickey and Michael Cera’s frazzled Glenn. Though “Sacramento” picks up at a low point in their friendship, the duo naturally conveys their years of shared experience. Angarano is confident enough behind the camera to rely on cues such as their body language and nicknames to establish Rickey and Glenn’s relationship. He doesn’t waste time explaining something that can just be understood. And that instinct proves out when he can cut directly from their boyish banter to a backyard push-up contest.
“Sacramento” is at its best when Angarano lets his film be “just guys being dudes” in Internet parlance. It’s a perceptive film about the way men of a certain age act around each other. (Which, is to say, like boys.) Working from an underdeveloped vocabulary of emotional expression, Rickey and Glenn struggle to communicate their wants and needs to one another. And with such uncertainty ahead in their future, they cling all the tighter to their shared past.
At its most extreme form, this involves Glenn agreeing to an impromptu road trip with Rickey from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Even though he expresses a desire to phase out the old pal when Rickey re-emerges, Glenn cannot bring himself to turn down the casual offer. But while the two might sense themselves navigating a divergent road, the film reveals their paths are far more parallel than either could imagine.
Both men keep a poorly guarded secret from the other. For Rickey, it’s the death of his father that he’s spent longer grieving than he’d like to admit. For Glenn, it’s a baby on the way with his even-keeled but put-out wife Rosie (Kirsten Stewart, maximizing her minimal screen time) that he’d rather not present as an opportunity for Rickey’s re-entry into his life. The general terms in which the buddies speak make sense because they highlight the deeper conversations both desperately want to avoid.
“Sacramento” glides by pleasantly, if not all that notably, because Angarano and Smith are comfortable letting most of their movie live on that surface level. The characters being unremarkable is part of the point. It’s not trying to pathologize or psychologize about their conditions. This is just the way they are, and millions of men are just like them. Besides, there’s little need for an excavation of some deep-seated trauma when Rickey and Glenn both manifest their worries so nakedly. And at 84 minutes in length, Angarano is mercifully well aware of how much mileage he can get out of a story this archetypal.
Unsurprisingly, given his greater involvement in the overall production, it’s Angarano who makes the greatest impression in “Sacramento.” His Rickey is a charming rogue without overdoing the slacker or sucker elements of the lovable loser character. Even though he’s a bit shaggy, the twinkle of Angarano’s golden retriever energy shines through all the shenanigans.
It’s Cera whose essence the film cannot quite bottle. His on-screen persona continues evolving from the nebbish teenager of “Arrested Development,” “Superbad,” and “Juno” into something much harder to pin down today. But he’s a little too elusive in “Sacramento,” alternating between playing the straight man and needing a straightjacket to disorienting effect. When the film needs him to make a big turn in the third act, it does not feel entirely earned.
Yet the nice destination at which “Sacramento” arrives helps make up for a late veering turn. Angarano does not claim to offer a conclusive diagnosis for what ails the modern man. Instead, he provides a keen observation: so many of Rickey and Glenn’s problems boil down to insisting on self-sufficiency when everything about our humanity cries out for community. They need more of each other, not of themselves. (Angarano’s real-life wife Maya Erskine making an appearance certainly underscores the point.) Just because this conclusion is a little trite does not mean it is any less true. [B-]
“Sacramento” is currently playing at the Tribeca Festival.