As a cinematic setting the pleasant but nondescript city of Sacramento, California will always for me belong to the cinema of Greta Gerwig, who grew up there and set both Lady Bird and a memorable passage from Frances Ha there in the so-called “City of Trees.” But that Gerwigian association helps not hinders the new film actually titled Sacramento, which is written and directed and acted in by Michael Angarano, the former child actor turned adorable adult thesp and filmmaker. Because this film, like those pre-blockbuster-era Gerwig joints before it, is a lovely and low-key character-study about aimless young-ish adults in crisis over that “ish.”
And it co-stars Barbie’s Allan no less! Hard to believe that this could be the cast of thirtysomething if that 1980s T.V. series got rebooted today, but here Michael Cera and Kristen Stewart play Glenn and Rosie, a yes-indeed thirtysomething married couple living in Los Angeles who are about to have their first baby. Like any second now—Rosie is well into her third trimester. And even though Stewart plays Rosie as the calmest, coolest, kindest pregnant lady on Earth, her patience with Glenn is nevertheless showing its seams.
Because the words “calm” and “cool” aren’t coming anywhere near Glenn these days. He’s a white-hot, barely contained ball of anxiety when we meet him—hearing a creak as he assembles his infant’s crib sends him into a spiral and the crib itself into the dumpster. Every electric outlet taunts him—the world suddenly seems like a whirlwind of disaster and he’s fully swept up in its storm.
Rosie, meanwhile and rightly, has other things on her mind—moistening washcloths to sooth her husband’s panicked brow just can’t be her number one at the moment. And so when Glenn’s estranged best friend Ricky (Angarano) suddenly shows up in their yard one afternoon, Rosie convinces Glenn to catch up with this blast from his past; anything to aim that energy of his in a different direction for five seconds seems good to her. (And it should be noted that even though Stewart’s role in the film is small, it’s given love and just enough room to feel fleshed out—and she’s also, no surprise, very funny.)
As for Ricky, well, the film has already let us know that Ricky is his own little disaster zone before we even got to Glenn and Rosie’s turmoils. A year after his father’s death, we’ve seen that he’s still haunting the same therapy group, annoying the actual people in charge to the point where they’re making like KStew and telling him he should maybe go aim his chaotic energy somewhere else, please, now, thanks and goodbye. And so these two hot messes meet up, neither one able or willing to verbalize their messes to the other—what could possibly go wrong, right?
Ricky makes up a story to Glenn about needing to spread his father’s ashes in Sacramento (some dirt from the side of the road stuffed into a plastic tennis ball cylinder acts is his improvised prop) when the two are out for a casual drive, and he sees the road-sign for Sacramento; truth is he’s never been to Sacramento, and his father had no connection to Sacramento at all. He doesn’t even know it’s not connected to the ocean. And a side-jaunt to Sacramento sounds to Glenn like the last place on Earth he should be going, poised as he is at the tippy top of the parenthood rollercoaster.
Yet before they’ve even managed to verbalize any of their doubts, some awful mix of happenstance smashes them together, and the two former friends are suddenly, despite these unspoken hesitations, stuck together on the unfriendliest road trip to one of the world’s least exciting destinations. It’s not exactly a parade of roses. There’s a lot of unfinished sentences and staring into the distance at first.
But like the film itself, the warmth and the humor slowly sneaks into these relationships. Angarano, making just his second feature film here, proves to be a keen observer of millennial manhood—although more intimate in scope than most other foundational generational texts, Sacramento still feels somewhat definitive about a precise group of people at this moment in time who’re going through the same thing. It has that air of a Diner or an American Graffiti about it. A lot of people are gonna vibe on these vibes, if given the chance.
And it helps that these are all faces we’re long familiar with; ones that we’ve watched grow up. Hell, Angarano’s real-life partner Maya Erskine (she of the masterpiece PEN15) shows up as Angrano’s love interest in the movie, and we were watching her “grow up” via tween-drag just a couple of years ago. (And Erskine is, as ever, a gem. Underused like Stewart, but a gem nonetheless)
Sacramento grows more confident and assured in itself as Ricky and Glenn’s road-trip lumbers on, in its off-kilter way, as we watch each of the two men slowly suss out that the other one is “Not great, Bob.” Not great at all. And Angarano and Cera share a truly gorgeous chemistry with one another, which certainly helps—as that blossoms outwards so goes the movie.
Intimate and often silly as it might be, Sacramento manages to cruise toward some deep and beautiful truths about friendship, confidence, and aging, in its final act—and if you feel any emotional connection to these actors going into it there’s a good chance this movie will, in its small way, smash you apart and put you back together again. In the best of ways. This is one of those little movies that could, and did, do that. Thank goodness somebody is still making them.
