As filmmakers, Mark and Jay Duplass make naturalistic, character-based comedies that use laughs almost as a part of a bait-and-switch to distract from how far they’re burrowing under the skin. The acting style that makes this method work, embodied by Mark’s starring performance in The Puffy Chair, has been a natural fit for films with similar methods, if different aims; as an actor, it makes sense that Duplass would pop up in lo-fi, highly improvised films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Humpday. Craig Johnson’s True Adolescents is an example of how that type of closely-observed, behavioral comedy can be wrangled into a comparatively conventional, crowd-pleasing indie film of higher-gloss variety. The result may not be mind-blowingly insightful or particularly creatively inspired, but it’s faced-paced and fun, and it’ll definitely play to the Alamo Drafthouse’s queso and beer crowd — and, if marketed right, to the wider world.
Sam, Duplass’ proudly smoking, designer headphone-sporting 34 year-old hipster, plays a show with his band Effort (get it?) and shortly after is rendered homeless when dumped by his exotically hot girlfriend. With nowhere to go and nothing in the bank, Sam calls on his Aunt Sharon (Melissa Leo), a post-hippie single mom struggling connect with her 14 year-old son Oliver. When Oliver’s dad fails to show up for a planned weekend in the woods at the last minute, as a show of gratitude to Sharon, Sam and ends up taking Oliver and his best friend Jake on a camping trip. Prickly male bonding, misunderstandings, and eventual mutual recognition ensues.
Duplass is essentially doing a broader version of a character we’ve seen him play before, the former (Humpday) or current (Hannah, Puffy) slacker fighting off some form of adult responsibility as hard as he possibly can without actually having to do much of anything. He’s really good at playing that guy, but he’s getting too old to play that guy, and that’s part of True Adolescents’ foundational joke. The actor has visibly aged since Puffy, and on some level it might be interesting to see him play another incarnation of commitment-phobe slack-ass in another four years. Unlike Paul Rudd, whose baby face belies the fact that he’ll turn 40 this year, if Duplass continues to do the same thing in progressively larger-scale, more accessible films, the performance will actually feel different, more tragic.
I digress into consideration A Consideration of the Career of One Mark Duplass, because True Adolescents doesn’t give one much else to say. It unabashedly prioritizes the natural punchlines of its premise over anything deeper or weirder, it loses considerable steam about half way through when a plot contrivance mandates a search through the woods, and the film’s major crisis is resolved as neatly as you surely expected it would be (another crisis is, disappointingly, not resolved at all — the film teases at a more literal definition of bromance than usually seen, but then lets that thread float away). But it’s hard to fault it for not hitting heights that it doesn’t seem to be aiming for. I’m writing about it not because it’s a such a success or such a failure creatively, but because I think people will genuinely enjoy it. In recent years, there’s been a vast gulf at SXSW between the tiny films critics and bloggers love and champion throughout the year (as in, virtually every other film Mark Duplass has been involved with) and the big movies that studios introduce to the audience in Austin which then become certifiable hits (as in, Knocked Up, or last year’s SXSW opening night film and eventual sleeper blockbuster 21). In scale and intention, True Adolescents feels squarely in the middle of those poles. I’m interested to see what its future brings, if it ends up drifting to one camp or another, or if it actually manages to bring the disparate fates together.
