Sometimes when actors write parts for themselves, they create characters they want to play rather than characters for audiences connect to. That’s the problem with “Sacramento,” with Michael Angarano not just directing, co-screenwriting, and starring as Ricky, but casting his wife, father, and even his baby in the film.
Michael Cera plays Glenn, Ricky’s best friend since childhood. Glenn’s wife Rosie (a luminous Kristen Stewart and the film’s highlight) is eight months pregnant. While he thinks he has outgrown his relationship with Ricky, Glenn is not as securely established as he would like to think he is. He struggles with anxiety over the overpowering responsibility of keeping a baby safe. To ensure the crib is stable, he shakes it so hard that he breaks it, and Rosie has to gently and sweetly remind him that she needs him to be more the giver than the recipient of caring attention. The best he can do is acknowledge that as “an actionable note” for him to work on. To add to his pressure, he expects to be laid off from his job. While Rosie has reassured him that she can support the family while he takes a year to stay home with the baby, that only increases his feeling of losing control.
Ricky shows up unexpectedly, after being out of touch for over a year. At first, Glenn is reluctant to reconnect. But when he sees that Ricky has somehow not just found but paid to restore the beat-up old convertible that holds so many memories for the two of them, he impulsively agrees to accompany Ricky on a road trip from LA to Sacramento to spread the ashes of Ricky’s father.
Except they are not Ricky’s father’s ashes. They’re not anyone’s ashes. We saw Rickey scoop up some dirt into a tennis ball can to almost sort of look like someone’s ashes, and it is not until later that we will learn the real reason for the trip.
Their adventures along the way include insulting a young female clerk in a convenience store because she does not have the exact kind of sunblock Glenn is looking for, spending the night with two women who are former boxers and now have a gym, and the two men ineptly scuffling with each other twice.
In a brief prelude to the story that takes place a year earlier, we see Ricky on a camping trip, where he meets Tallie (Maya Erskine, who is married to Angarano and who is wonderfully warm and real). He imagines them staying there together forever, starting their own civilization. She says he would bail on her. We will see her on the trip as well.
The biggest problem with the film is that every woman in the story is more interesting than Ricky and Glenn, even the store clerk. The men are immature, needy, and caught up in themselves at the expense of those around them. Angarano, the co-writer (with Christopher Nicholas Smith) and director, presents them to the women in the film (and us in the audience) as appealing out of proportion to any kind of reality.
The only information we get about the basis of the men’s friendship is a reference to their meeting as children, which ended with Glenn in the hospital, and the suggestion that they had some good times in the car Ricky has had restored. Glenn’s possible mixture of OCD and anxiety, triggered into higher gear by losing his job as the baby is about to arrive, is not given enough attention to be more than a distraction.
Glenn and Ricky have an oddly elliptical way of talking to each other (Glenn’s vocabulary flavored with office manager-speak and Ricky’s with therapy-speak), which raises intriguing questions that would have been more fruitful to explore than much of what is on screen. Stewart and Erskine light up the movie with vivid, layered, authentic performances that capture our interest but throw the movie out of balance. One more screenplay draft would have been worthwhile; there are glimmers of a better version that create some optimism for Angarano’s next film.
