Sacramento

“Sacramento” begins in Los Angeles where dad-to-be Glenn (Michael Cera) puts the finishing touches on what will be his first child’s crib. Overcome with anxiety, he decides the crib isn’t sturdy enough, rips it apart, and dumps the splintered remains outside. He’s not ready to be a dad, in other words, and which his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) knows, encouraging him not just to go hang out with his rash friend Rickey (Michael Angarano), who first appears hiding in a tree outside their home, seeking an element of surprise in his saying hello, but to take a spur of the moment road trip with him to California’s capital city to help him grieve by spreading his father’s ashes. After all, a road trip is the only cure for such male blues, a rather conventional hook belying a rather conventional arc that Angarano, who directed, still evinces with enough flair and wit to render it enjoyable. 

In Rickey’s air, it is as obvious to the audience as it is to Glenn that this trip really isn’t about his father’s ashes, and thankfully Angarano, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Smith, doesn’t endeavor to conceal this truth too long. When the director reveals this truth to the audience, it’s through a slapstick scene at a gas station in which Rickey stuffs dirt in a tennis ball can in the guise of ashes, building to a solid comic capper where an unwitting Glenn kicks away one of the tennis balls, demonstrating Angarano’s penchant throughout for visual physical comedy. And though he does tend to let his soundtrack do too much of the emotional work, I liked Angarano’s choice of Smog’s “Hit the Ground Running” laid over a scene in which the two friends/not-friends end up comically/not-so-comically acting out their passive aggressions in a fighting ring in lieu of going to therapy.

As “Sacramento” closes in on Rickey’s real reason for bringing Glenn there, it can start to feel like a left coast version of last year’s “A Real Pain” but with fatherhood as the subject rather than heritage. That’s not to suggest it’s derivative, just that there are striking similarities between the characters, and just as in “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg as director let his acting co-star Keiran Culkin walk away with the picture so, too, is Angarano content to center his picture as Cera’s. And though the script might have stood to round out Glenn a little more, especially where his job is concerned, Cera brings the character fully to life, nevertheless, bordering on unlikable without tipping over into unsympathetic.

As good as Cera is, though, Stewart quietly, effortlessly walks away with “Sacramento” despite limited screen time. If one more tale of immature dudes finding the wherewithal to mount up and become men leaves you nonplussed, honestly, I understand, and the truth is, “Sacramento” isn’t entirely helped by its ending glossing over some tough questions with montages. Neither, though, does “Sacramento” abandon its female characters in the way that Rickey and Glenn do. As Rickey’s old flame Tallie, who appears at the beginning and then again toward the end, Maya Erskine makes the movie itself and its deliberate semi-aimlessness focus as much as Rickey himself. Her character, though, is also more well-drawn than Stewart’s and so it’s an extra testament to the latter that she still makes Rosie feel lived-in. Written as almost heroically patient, Stewart smartly lets quiet exasperation still seep through, bringing the character’s dressing down of Glenn that she shouldn’t have to take care of him like a second infant to life.