‘Sacramento’ is a road comedy that gets stuck in second gear
“Sacramento” — 2.5 stars
It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.
The film represents the second directorial outing for actor Michael Angarano (the first was “Avenues” in 2017), and it’s confident enough in its low-key fashion. Angarano (“Oppenheimer,” “This Is Us”) co-wrote the script with Christopher Nicholas Smith and stars as Rickey, the manic, sad-boy friend of Glenn (Michael Cera), whose wife, Rosie (Kristen Stewart), is pregnant with their first child — a fact that has Glenn in a tailspin of anxiety and denial. The last thing he needs is his crazy childhood pal showing up and dragging him on the six-hour drive from Los Angeles to Sacramento, supposedly to dispose of Rickey’s father’s ashes.
There’s another agenda at work, of course, and if “Sacramento” has a flaw, it’s that it takes too long for the revelations to start pouring out. Until then, the film’s an awfully mild entry in the buddy/road trip genre, with a standard odd-couple pairing of uptight straight man vs. walking comic disaster that was seen to much stronger effect in the recent “A Real Pain” or the now-classic “Sideways” (2004). Which is to say it’s a thoroughly plowed field, and the script doesn’t turn up anything new other than noting that Rickey’s just been kicked out of a grief therapy group for offering the others better advice than the social worker (Rosalind Chao) leading it.
Tellingly, a mid-movie pit stop at a bar that results in a long, un-adulterous night with two friendly women (A.J. Mendez and Iman Karram) ambles nowhere in particular; given that they wind up in a boxing gym, the sequence seems a particular waste of author and professional wrestler Mendez. Or maybe that’s the point: Rickey and Glenn climb into the ring and resume a mock sissy fight that probably started back in second grade as the women look indulgently on.
When Rickey finally reveals his real reason for the trip, “Sacramento” begins to pull itself together and gather force. Without giving away too much, it involves a onetime fling named Tallie, played by Maya Erskine (“PEN15,” Amazon’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) with a specific and genuine comic weariness that has the effect of snapping the men’s performances into focus. She’s wonderful, and suddenly “Sacramento” is looking pretty good.
(By contrast, Glenn’s wife, Rosie, is a model of patience and forbearance so extreme that she’s difficult to buy as an actual person, and because there simply isn’t enough for Stewart to play, the actress drifts through her role as a congenial blank.)
The theme, when it surfaces, is as old as mankind and as relevant as today’s commitment-phobic man babies: how to step up to the plate of parenthood without either becoming terrified of dropping the ball (or the kid) or freaking out and running away. How to be a grown-up, in other words, which the women already are. That Angarano has cast his movie with Erskine, his offscreen wife (and the mother of their two young children), and Stewart, his ex-girlfriend, is a sign that he’s either a genuinely openhearted creative force or crazy as a loon.
Rickey is just crazy in ways that are buddy-movie generic before becoming relatable in the home stretch; as the tightly wound Glenn, Cera works hard to find the humor and humanity in a thinly written part. “Sacramento” is crisply filmed (by Ben Mullen), and it idles engagingly before shifting into gear, but it’s a half-hour short marooned in a feature-length film. Maybe Angarano and Erskine can get a good night’s sleep before embarking on their next co-production.
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In theaters. Rated R for mature language. 89 minutes.