A group of friends experiences a wild and crazy day in Summer Night
SUMMER NIGHT (Joseph Cross, 2019)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, July 12
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.samuelgoldwynfilms.com
Summer Night, actor Joseph Cross’s directorial debut, offers a twist on the standard ensemble coming-of-age flick: Its protagonists are not a bunch of high school teens looking to get stoned and laid before leaving for college (or not) but a group of older twenty-somethings facing more serious choices about their future. The film, which opens this weekend at Cinema Village, still has to fight genre clichés and mundane digressions as it tells the stories of close-knit friends gathering at a music bar appropriately called the Alamo in their small-town American community on the last night of summer. Jameson (Ellar Coltrane) is the film’s centerpiece, an all-around-good dude with a sound perspective on life who surprises everyone that night by arriving at the show with the impossibly hot, black-leather-clad Harmony (Victoria Justice), who’s not the kind of woman he usually dates. The less-flashy Corin (Elena Kampouris), who is working the door at the Alamo, is more his speed, but as we will learn, most of the characters are deeper than the usual genre stereotypes.
Vanessa (Melina Vidler) is not exactly having the night of her life in debut film from actor Joseph Cross
Longtime couple Seth (Ian Nelson) and Mel (Analeigh Tipton) reach a crossroads when she tells him she is pregnant, while Jack “Rabbit” (Bill Milner) is shocked to learn his best friend, and possible true-love romantic partner, Lexi (Lana Condor), has lost her virginity to someone else. Rugged musician Taylor (Callan McAuliffe) unexpectedly meets up with the very sweet, younger Dana (Ella Hunt) after he is mugged in the woods. Bass player Caleb (Hayden Szeto) is a nice guy who just wants to have fun, Vanessa (Melina Vidler) has a thing for Taylor, and Andy (Justin Chatwin), the most outgoing and boisterous among them, secretly wonders whether his time has already passed. Meanwhile, older bar patron Luke (Khris Davis) represents potential stability, having settled down with a wife and kids.
Written by first-time screenwriter Jordan Jolliff, Summer Night takes a while to kick into gear as you figure out whether you want to spend any time with these characters, and there’s too much live music (featuring real bands Ruby the RabbitFoot, Roadkill Ghost Choir, and Deep State) — “Is this, like, all you guys do? Sit around and talk about bands nobody cares about?” Vanessa asks — but Cross, who played Tom the barista in Big Little Lies and Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors, eventually finds his groove. The relationship between Caleb and Dana is sweet, and Coltrane (Boyhood, Blood Money) stands out as the group’s conscience as the characters realize there are consequences to their actions, and inactions. The key line just may be when Mel says, “This is not the plan,” with some adapting better than others.