93 min | PG-13 | July 14, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
A scrappy theater camp loses its founder to a strobe-light coma and inherits her clueless crypto-bro son. The teachers keep the lights on through sheer delusion and a homemade musical. It is a mockumentary by theater kids who know the joke is on them and tell it anyway.
A summer theater camp in upstate New York runs on passion, delusion, and no money. Its founder lands in a coma after a strobe-light incident at a middle school production of Bye Bye Birdie. Her crypto-bro son Troy arrives to keep the place alive without the first idea of how theater works. The film is a mockumentary about the kind of people who organize their entire identity around the stage, and it takes their devotion seriously even while laughing at it. What it is really about is the gap between people who can do the thing and people who only love the thing, and whether that gap matters as much as either side believes.
Ben Platt plays Amos as a teacher who treats children’s musical theater with the intensity of a war tribunal. He is funniest when he is most certain he is right. Molly Gordon plays Rebecca-Diane as his songwriting partner, and the two share a codependence that the film slowly reveals to be one-sided. Jimmy Tatro plays Troy with a himbo cluelessness that never tips into cruelty, which keeps the outsider from becoming a villain. Ayo Edebiri plays Janet, who lied about every skill on her resume, and she mines the panic of a person improvising competence in real time. Nathan Lee Graham plays Clive with a withering precision that makes every line a verdict.
Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman direct from a script the two wrote with Platt and Noah Galvin. They shoot it as a handheld documentary, with the camera hunting for reactions and catching performers mid-sentence. The improvised dialogue overlaps and steps on itself, which builds the texture of a real institution where everyone has known each other for years. The film withholds its big number until the end and lets the original songs do the emotional work that the comedy keeps deflecting. The editing favors the quick cut to a deadpan face over the held joke, which keeps the satire moving and the sentiment in check.
This is a film made by theater kids about theater kids, and it refuses to apologize for either. It mocks the self-seriousness of the form and then stages a finale that earns the self-seriousness back. The ensemble works as an actual ensemble, with no single performance crowding out the others. The whole thing runs on affection rather than ambition, and it knows exactly what it is. That modesty is the point and not a limitation.