A wonderful town
You might know Michael Angarano’s face even if you don’t know his name. He’s a little bit of a “that guy”: a minor teen star who stayed productive on the fringes of the Hollywood radar. His most famous role is the lead part of Sky High, and he was the time-traveling teen in wuxia film The Forbidden Kingdom. He also popped up in smaller roles of critical darlings Almost Famous and Speak. The past decade he’s mostly embraced little-seen indies, though he had a minor role in Oppenheimer.
Angarano is also carving a path as a cringe-comedy, Woody Allen-esque filmmaker. Sacramento marks Angarano’s second film at the helm, following up his 2017 directorial debut Avenues, a no-budget quarter-life-crisis unpolished gem set in Manhattan that deserved more eyes than it got. That film really charmed me with its ragged character portraits and Angarano’s apparent gift for joke construction and delivery. I recommend checking it out: As of this writing, it’s got fewer than 1,000 logs on Letterboxd and is available at The People’s Streamer, Tubi.
His sophomore effort, Sacramento, picks up right where Avenues left off. If not for the change of coast, name, and life circumstances, Angarano’s Rickey could easily be the same guy from Avenues, just with eight more years of damage. It opens with a short vignette of Rickey fumbling his way through a meet cute with Tallie (Maya Erskine). Flash forward a year: Rickey is not in a good spot. He is in the care of a psychiatric facility and barely guarding his grief at various losses in his life, but apparently more interested in charming the group therapy room than addressing his own unresolved demons, setting up a pattern of projection that will recur the rest of the film.
Meanwhile, Glenn (Michael Cera), Rickey’s oldest friend, is facing down a different crisis: impending fatherhood. Married to the comically laid back Rosie (Kristen Stewart) in LA, Glenn is fraying under the prospect of bringing new life into this messy world, especially amid mass layoffs at his Amazon-coded job. Rickey shows up out of the blue after getting booted from the psych facility, his trunk covertly filled with all his belongings, suggesting a weekend away in Sacramento, presumably to butter up his bud and ask for a place to crash for a while. Glenn is too psychologically exhausted to resist Rickey’s annoyingly dogged personality, so he agrees to the spontaneous road trip. Hijinks ensue; emotional truths emerge.
The heart of the film is the prickly friendship between Rickey and Glenn. Both Cera and Angarano are outstanding at capturing different flavors of neurosis: Glenn is a coiled, anxious tinder box, while Rickey is manic deflection personified. Angarano and Smith’s script does a great job inverting aspects of the usual odd couple dynamic — the straight man who’s “got it together” is the more erratic of the pair. There’s a complementary nature to Rickey and Glenn’s dysfunction, and also a built-in sense of history between them, where it’s clear they’ve both drifted further from their more stable peaks in which the friendship formed. I changed my mind three times about who gives the better performance, and I’m still not sure I’ve landed on a verdict. If the year ended today, I’d pencil in both in for the 2025 B.A.D.S.
(Also, I’d be remiss not to mention what virtually everyone I know who’s seen the movie has pointed out: Rickey and Glenn’s dynamic bears more than a passing resemblance to Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin’s duo in A Real Pain, down to the physical appearances of the actors.)
The supporting cast, unfortunately, gets much less room to work. Stewart (Angarano’s ex!) shows up for three brief scenes as the extremely pregnant Rosie. She has some dryly funny lines, but should be in the movie about twice as much as she is. Rosie is one good script rewrite away from being a highlight in the film. As-is, she vanishes before she leaves a real impression. Erskine (Angarano’s current wife and co-parent) gets a little more material to work with, but, like Stewart, could use a boost in screentime to leverage her excellent presence and comedic chops. She at least gets to play three distinct tones across as many scenes, nailing them all, and gets to show off a few good bits of physical comedy.
The story could use a bit more structure, but I really like the script — it’s obvious Angarano and Smith put real thought and soul-searching into it. Some plot points that seem like pure shagginess and sketch comedy are actually bits of misdirection and setup for the film’s second half. For a movie with this much hangout vibe, the story includes a few bold narrative swings in the back half that mostly stick the landing — one key revelation at the third-act turn really puts the movie into overdrive.
(Side note: I’ve never been to Sacramento the city, but between this, Lady Bird, Joan Didion, that ’70s song, and a handful of other depictions, I associate it as a place you hate to be in, but hate even more to leave behind. It’s like the anti-matter version of LA, the blue-collar ugly stepchild of California sunshine. What is it about this place that makes people wax poetic?)
Just as important as the drama, Sacramento is very funny, with credit due to both the writing and the performances. Angarano and Cera both have good comic instincts, and the script plays to their strengths: nervous over-explaining, ill-timed remarks, and circular, escalating arguments. Movies like this usually settle for funny-ish gags with half-baked punchlines, but the hit rate of the jokes here is high. I even liked some of the broader bits — a wrestling match staged like a lo-fi drug trip and the most pathetic ash scattering in a movie since The Big Lebowski. The movie isn’t a joke vehicle like a traditional comedy, but Angarano finds a Goldilocks zone where the yuks and drama are in perfect balance, exactly what I like for in dramedies.
The film builds towards an examination of reluctant or anxious fatherhood from a bunch of different lenses — from both fathers and sons, from present dads and distant ones. It’s a little sprawling and shambling. It could have used one additional layer of focus or structure, the way A Real Pain used a Holocaust tour as a path into dealing with grief and broken down relationships. (Angarano has one late monologue where he describes what he expects his future to hold, and I expected a haymaker, but it lands a bit soft, like Angarano and Smith just couldn’t find the right bow to tie around Rickey’s character growth.) The film’s observations ring authentic, though — it’s no surprise to me that Angarano is a recent father himself.
What really holds the film together is Angarano’s filmmaking voice. In just two films, he’s carved out a distinct space. His films traffic in cringe comedy and unflinching portraits of men working through a new phase in life. His characters are melancholic wanderers, and his stories probe complicated, challenged relationships with the people the characters are closest to — whether family, friend, or romance. In both movies, he writes for himself a confrontational character it’s easy to dislike. And yet his characters and his movies still have good vibes — jazzy score, inviting cinematography, good blend of sweet and bitter. I hope he keeps carving this niche and pushing himself. I’ll definitely follow where he goes next.
Given my appreciation for the unheralded Avenues, Sacramento was one of my most anticipated films of the year. And while it doesn’t quite deliver the breakout jump to the next level for Angarano I was hoping for — there’s still a touch of first-draft energy to the structure and character work — it’s a film I immediately treasure, in part because I’m a recent dad. (Well, my oldest is almost 8. How long am I allowed to call myself a “recent dad”?) My head says Sacramento merely good and fine, but my heart tells me it’s something special made just for me, and in these cases, I usually go with my heart.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.