From Humpday to Your Sister's Sister to Touchy Feely, Lynn Shelton has earned her place as an indie darling for crafting small-scale stories that emphasize relationships over spectacle. More often than not they have to do with characters who find themselves in a state of arrested development, manifested in ways that are unpredictable and confounding to the people in their lives. Her latest film, Laggies, is just such a story and now the first trailer for it has been released months after the film debuted at Sundance.
Starring Keira Knightley, Sam Rockwell, and Chloe Grace Moretz, Laggies centers on Megan, a 28-year-old who used to be hot stuff in high school but now as all of her friends' lives are improving she's been stuck in a rut. She's still with her loyal but dull high school sweetheart (Mark Webber, typecast again) and she can't hold on to the crappy jobs she keeps getting. When her boyfriend suddenly proposes marriage, Megan has a total breakdown, runs away, and starts hanging out with a teenaged crowd led by 16-year-old Annika.It's pretty silly but Shelton's strength has always been finding a means of taking crazy concepts and making them personal and meaningful. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work with Laggies, noting in my review "the film skates on the edges of believability but it calls on us to take certain things seriously when there are never any repercussions".
Also starring Ellie Kemper, Kaitlyn Dever (Short Term 12), Gretchen Mol, and Jeff Garlin, Laggies opens October 24th.
