Slow ride, take it easy
There’s a line my podcast co-host Brian likes to quote from the 30 Rock bit “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” where Tracy Morgan/Jordan declares that “this whole premise is sweaty.” I’ve never been able to define exactly what “sweaty” means in this context, but I know it when I see it. The premise of Driver’s Ed is sweaty.
Jeremy (Sam Nivola), a high school senior, has a long-distance girlfriend in college, Samantha (Lilah Pate), who insinuates during a drunken phone call that she’s about to dump him. So, mid-lesson, Jeremy steals his driver’s ed car, a canary-yellow Kia, and starts driving toward her campus a few hundred miles away, inadvertently kidnapping three classmates: level-headed Evie (Sophie Telegadis), stoner Yoshi (Aidan Laprete), and valedictorian Aparna (Mohana Krishnan). Jeremy’s plan is to show up and perform some unformed grand romantic gesture. The plan is not good.
Neither, for a while, is the movie’s sense of cause and effect. The three passengers point out the obvious: grand theft auto will get you arrested and expelled. And then they just… climb in anyway. And then in our B-plot sit a handful of authority figures trying to stop Jeremy, and they are operating in pure cartoon mode. (Parents are literally not mentioned.) The result is a film about very real adolescent feelings routed through a story too outrageous and underdeveloped to support them, and for the first half I couldn’t get my arms around it. The narrative construction is broken, and, more damningly, the movie is funny-ish rather than funny. It has no line reading you’ll repeat later, no set piece that really detonates. Instead, Driver’s Ed coasts on an inviting hangout chemistry and a warm mood.
And then the last third pulls the movie together on the strength of two factors. The first is that the movie finally stops rushing its teenagers through half-cooked story beats and lets them breathe a little, interrogating their various problems and hopes and dreams with real tenderness. The story shifts from muddled comedy to a coming-of-age character story. The second strength of the final act is the climactic campus party, shot with genuine energy and feeling: that intoxication of being young and uninhibited and open to the entire world while surrounded by people who are the same. It’s a very charming and generous finale to the movie, sending off its entire ensemble, even the wacky antagonist teachers, with endings more sweet than bitter, slightly introspective and transformed.
That gentleness ends up being the movie’s defining trait despite the Bobby Farrelly director credit. The movie is pretty high on sincerity and pretty low on raunch, employing a John Hughes character trope deconstruction. It is certainly not another Dumb and Dumber (another Farrelly road trip joint that premiered at TIFF once upon a time). Thomas Moffett’s screenplay runs a bit too safe and familiar and feels a little out of sync with the director, but bits of personality in both the writing and direction shine through: For example, Jeremy has dream of becoming a filmmaker, and the movie considers what that means for his connection with the people around him. It is a personal detail that suggests a richer movie might have been idling somewhere under the hood of Moffett and Farrelly kept tinkering and found more such touches.
The cast is what keeps the movie mostly on track even when the road gets bumpy. Nivola, a breakout from the most recent season of White Lotus, anchors everything with understated charm and vulnerability that make him absurdly easy to root for. (He would have crushed in 2010s Sundance movies like It’s Kind of a Funny Story and The Way Way Back.) But the real winner here is Laprete, a full-on repeat scene-stealer as Yoshi, landing deadpan after deadpan while still finding depth in the stoner. He lands comic beats and dramatic ones both, and I hope he has a long career as a character actor ahead of him. Telegadis is unremarkable but likable, and has excellent chemistry as the foil to Nivola. Principal Fisher (Molly Shannon) offers an acerbic, slightly absurd, authority figure that Shannon could play in her sleep, and she’s wonderful. Mr. Rivers (Kumail Nanjiani), a doofus instructor made funnier by a repeatedly inconvenient arm cast, reminds you that he’s a seasoned sitcom vet… though the instant I imagined Paul Rudd in the part, I couldn’t stop wishing it were him. (He’s basically written as the surf instructor from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)
Once it finds its feet, Driver’s Ed is pleasing enough as a teen comedy teetering between PG-13 and R. Whether that’s worthwhile to you depends almost entirely on your willingness to forgive a heap of plotting wonkiness and an uneven tone in exchange for reaching the amber-hearted coming-of-age storytelling at the core… and, friend, I am the easiest mark there is for that pitch. This was assembled in a lab to my precise specifications: a teenage odyssey, a big party as the destination, a surprising little romance waiting at dawn. The premise stays sweaty the whole way through, but I rolled the window down anyway.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.