The new comedy Growing Up and Other Lies concerns thirtysomething New Yorker Jake (Josh Lawson), who is about to give up a sputtering art career and move in with his ailing father in Ohio. For his Big City swan song, Jake has planned an all-day trek down the length of Manhattan, 260-plus blocks from the Harlem River to the tip of Battery Park. This odyssey also serves as a reunion with his three ex-roommates: Rock (Adam Brody), a teacher with a pregnant girlfriend he doesn't love; Billy (co-director Danny Jacobs), a successful attorney with a fourth-grader's social skills; and droll cynic Gunderson (Wyatt Cenac), whose job is evidently to needle everyone else, especially Billy. The friends quickly turn the journey into an opportunity to dissuade Jake from leaving the city he plainly adores. Indeed, Jake himself seems to have reservations about the move, as it would mean both admitting professional failure and abandoning his hope of reconcilement with ex-girlfriend Tabatha (Amber Tamblyn).
Growing Up is the second feature from St. Louis natives Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, who previously co-directed the pot-farming dramedy Humboldt County. Like that film, Growing Up is a tale of conflicted middle-class man-children, hardly an underrepresented group in American indie cinema. The film's characters and emotional beats are both wearily familiar, and its visual style is more fitting for a sketch comedy show than a theatrical feature. Nonetheless, the film generally proves to be a lively, diverting tour of both male arrested development and Manhattan itself. (For non-Gothamites, pithy cutaways to scribbled, animated map track the friends' progress through the borough.) The film's comic sensibility is colloquial, acidic, and slightly absurd, recalling the early works of Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith. Strictly as a low-key yarn of human folly, Growing Up makes for an engaging 90 minutes.
Growing Up & Other Lies screens Saturday, November 22, at 5:30 p.m. at the Tivoli Theatre, 6350 Delmar. For more information, visit the Cinema St. Louis website, cinemastlouis.org.
