The Adults Review: Growing Up Is Hard to Do in Dustin Guy Defa’s Cringe Comedy

The title of Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults inevitably invokes the word “adulting.” For all the wrongheadedness of people whining about immature millennials, there’s something to the idea that young-ish people today sit uncomfortably with the idea of being grown-ups. For a generation launched out of a period of abundance and comfort into an era of austerity and uncertainty, traditional adult roles are performances that can at best be half-heartedly assumed.

Defa’s dramedy hardly delves into macro-economic questions, but it does embed this generational feeling of uncertainty into the way that its characters interact with one another. The Adults is a coming-of-age story that asks how grown-up siblings, caught in a kind of existential stasis, are even capable of dealing with the serious parts of life when they haven’t let go of their youth in the same way that earlier generations were expected to. Or, rather, it asks this question about white, suburban, young adults born of relative affluence and in convenient possession of a rather neatly curated collection of precious inside jokes.

The ironic intent of the film’s title is basically confirmed as soon as a patchy-bearded, baggy-clothed Michael Cera, that icon of millennial arrested development, shuffles into the opening shot, an otherwise still image of an antiseptically clean hotel room. Cera’s character, Eric, is in the midst of a phone call, from which we surmise that he’s visiting his hometown. We also overhear him, mysteriously, cancel plans with his friend Scott (Christopher Denham), giving the excuse that he’ll be spending his first night in town with his sisters, Rachel (Hannah Gross) and Maggie (Sophia Lillis), only to then tell them that he’ll be hanging out with that same friend.

Eric is strangely impassive while executing this con, lying to and canceling plans with each loved one as if he were changing a pizza order. What does he actually do that night, which we later find out is his first trip home in three years? He tries to get an old acquaintance (Wavyy Jonez) to restart an old poker game. Thereafter, he continually skips out on the somewhat stand-offish Rachel and the adoring Maggie to hone his Texas Hold ‘Em prowess.

We’ll follow the travails of Eric’s developing local poker career throughout the rest of the film, as he keeps extending his visit to play in a higher-stakes game, meanwhile allowing his sisters to believe that he’s staying in order to see more of them. But The Adults isn’t about gambling addiction, as Defa’s screenplay is more interested in Eric’s poker obsession as an outlet for the lost and listless than as an intrinsic failure of character. Forms of play also serve as a crutch in Eric’s relationship with his sisters: As Eric seems only able to utter evasions and half-truths when the trio speaks straightforwardly, in order to relate to each other they assume goofy personas and song-and-dance routines that they invented when they were kids.

These elaborate routines can come off as twee, like a prolonged improv set by a high-school drama class, but there’s also plenty to the siblings’ off-beat interactions that endears one to them. Eric and Rachel both occasionally speak to Maggie in not-terrible Marge Simpson voices, the joke implicitly deriving from the fact that Maggie is the baby of the family. They erupt into a choreographed dance at a party that devolves from sloppy imitations of halftime choreography into a precise recreation of the famous dance scene from Godard’s Band of Outsiders.

For the most part, Defa effectively balances the potentially excessive charm of these moments with the resentful barbs that Eric and Rachel exchange in scenes shot through with a certain cringe-comic tension, and the no-frills intrigue that he builds around Cera’s ambiguous character. Eric is in town from Portland, where we’re led to believe that he has a reasonably successful career, and he humble-brags to people at the poker games that he can change his flights whenever he wants because he has such high status at the poker games.

And yet, nothing about Eric’s demeanor exactly shouts “guy who’s got it together.” His emotional distance is also something of a puzzle throughout the film: As the viewer learns through the gradual accumulation of recriminations from Rachel, they haven’t spoken much since their mother died some time before the last time that Eric visited. Hence the creeping sadness that accompanies the outwardly impassive young man through the typical, less than thrilling waystations of a visit back home: a diner, a bowling alley, a zoo, and a house party.

The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood. Toward the end, though, the film also pulls its punches, ultimately using its quirky humor in a way not dissimilar to its main character: as a crutch to bear the emotional weight it can’t carry on its own. The inevitable reconciliation between the siblings avoids open emotionality even while the script is invoking it, with its tearful confessions staged with an awkwardness that, this time, feels unintentional.

The finale also offers a heartwarming affirmation that it’s not necessarily always for the worse that “growing up” is less desirable than it’s ever been. That is, if adulting means growing a scraggly beard, repressing your pain, and moving to Oregon to do something that earns you lots of mileage, maybe in the long run it’s preferable to stay home and play with your siblings.