‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ is a fitfully moving comedy/drama
This Tribeca film tells a particular coming-of-age story about a boy growing up in the theater.
In most fictional treatments that deal with a teenaged boy who’s super into theater and possibly gay, while his older brother is a jock, you’d think their father would relate more to the brother who’s a jock. But when that father is an aspiring theater impresario, that tends to complicate things.
That’s the oddly specific premise of Everything’s Going to Be Great, a coming-of-age comedy/drama that played at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, and opens in theaters this Friday, as movies that premiere at Tribeca usually see the light of day either a week or two later, or two or three years later, and rarely in between.
I was into the premise, and especially the performances by Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney, but the film seriously runs out of steam in its second half.
The idea of this film is so oddly specific that I figure it must be autobiographical to some degree, of either the director or the screenwriter. The film was directed by Jon S. Baird, whose previous film was Tetris, which was the third-best movie of 2023 that told the story of the corporate development of a product. It comes from Steven Rogers- no, not Captain America, but rather the guy who wrote I, Tonya.
In the film, set at some point in the late ‘80s, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth plays Lester, a young theater kid with Broadway dreams who’s at the spot in his life when he knows he needs to find his people, but hasn’t quite found them yet. And while they’re the sort of family who sings Gilbert and Sullivan together in the car, they’re not quite willing to give Lester prominent roles in their shows.
Lester is the sort of kid who, when confronted with a bully, will burst into the “Sodomy/Fellatio” song from Hair; he also has visions of the likes of William Inge and Tallulah Bankhead. His life might be even worse if he wasn’t the son of Buddy Smart (Cranston), who runs a local theater and has aspirations of theatrical expansion.
Cranston, in particular, is a delight here, as a guy with big aspirations but not quite the talent to make them come true. He’s matched by Janney, who’s stuck with her husband this far, but that doesn’t mean she’s happy with him. Chris Cooper turns up in the third act as a relative, while Simon Rex, from Red Rocket, plays a theater actor.
I won’t spoil what happens halfway through the movie, except to say that the film suddenly subtracts its most compelling character, while also taking a turn both geographically and thematically. Religion and spirituality enters the proceedings, in a way that doesn’t quite work.
Still, we’ll always have that excellent first act.