Not only is growing up hard to do, it's apparently an impossibility when living in Manhattan. Growing Up and Other Lies is one of those exasperating, totally fraudulent New York-centric indies about how tough it is to make it in the big city...without actually showing how tough it is to make it in the big city. While ostensibly a buddy comedy about four best bros, nobody is authentic enough that we believe they are friends at all.
House of Lies' Josh Lawson plays irritating blowhard Jake, a starving artist who is sick of constantly coming up short. He's gathered his buddies for one final epic journey across Manhattan from end-to-end; a 15-mile, 260-block walking tour of all their favorite haunts. It's like The World's End only worse, less meaningful, and certainly less funny. When it's over he'll leave the city forever, heading back home to Cleveland to work with his ailing father. Jake, who spends the bulk of the film whining about his "existential crisis" and pining for his newly single ex-girlfriend Tabitha (Amber Tamblyn), is just as frustrating as his pals, all of which are in various states of arrested development. Gunderson (Wyatt Cenac) is a total black hole of negativity; Billy (co-writer/director Danny Jacobs) is a lawyer but somehow still a total wimp; and Rocks (Adam Brody) is about to have a child with a girl he wants nothing to do with. So they've all got problems, but nobody actually deals with anything in a meaningful way. If they don't take it seriously, why should we?
Lawson and co-writer/director Darren Grodsky break up the overlong journey in little bite-sized pieces, highlight different aspects of the friends' relationship as well as their various concerns about the future. Or at least that seems to have been the idea, but instead what we get are amateurish comedy skits that don't enlighten us about anything. The film begins with Jake vomiting onto the street and things don't really pick up. The major problem is that we have zero reason to like any of these people, and they don't even seem to like one another. The extent of their positive interactions amounts to debating increasingly weird "Sophie's Choice" predicaments. But the rest of the time they spend squabbling about absolutely nothing, so it doesn't ring true that the guys want to convince Jake to stay. In fact, that subplot is practically dropped altogether, perhaps because someone realized it didn't really make sense. Very little in Growing Up and Other Lies does, however, and by the time it's over not only do we want Jake to leave, we're also looking for a way out.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
