The Reel Review
Summer break takes a dramatic turn when a precocious 14-year-old aspiring playwright with dreams of living in New York City discovers that his suburban family’s new twenty-something pool boy Brad is an aspiring actor/performance artist from the city. Everett Blunck, Owen Teague and Melanie Lynskey star in this coming-of-age LGBTQ+ dramedy.
It turns out that the hilarious, wildly age inappropriate, adult-themed play our tween playwright has created, about an alcoholic and her philandering husband, is largely based on Griffin’s own miserable family life. Blunck perfectly channels the essence of the gratingly annoying theater kid you knew in school who one minute you felt sorry for and wanted to hug, and the next minute you wanted to throttle for being so incredibly obnoxious. Teague (To Leslie, Montana Story) is hysterical as the way too intense actor stealing the scenes from his castmates, literal children.
As an increasingly infatuated and stalkerish Griffin schemes his way into his would-be crush’s life, upheaval ensues, some funny, some really cringey, with Kathryn Newton (Abigail, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Brad’s “trash bag” girlfriend, Chloe, and Lynskey as Griffin’s unhappily married mom. Writer/director Nicholas Colia, in his feature film debut, sticks the landing, with a really sweet, heartwarming ending.
REEL FACTS
• Kathryn Newton and Abby Ryder Fortson (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.) each played Cassie Lang in Marvel’s Ant-Man trilogy.
• Griffin in Summer star Everett Blunck next stars in the psychological thriller The Plague, about a socially awkward boy enduring psychological torture at a water polo camp.
• Griffin in Summer was filmed in Richmond, Virginia.
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