The film industry creates no shortage of indie movies about characters who are old enough to be adults, but who nonetheless live in a state of depressed, arrested development. That doesn’t mean that these movies can’t still be good if they find a unique voice or are made especially well though. Lynn Shelton is the kind of director who likes to make loosely-scripted, improv-heavy, small-scale, realist movies, so they too need to bring a little something extra to the table in order to be good. Her Your Sister’s Sister cast found an amazing chemistry and created an amazing movie together as a result, while her more recent film, Touchy Feely, came off as more of an unfocused mess. Laggies, which is both a lost young adult movie as well as a Lynn Shelton movie, is a solid-though-unspectacular effort that puts it not only right in the middle of the pack of slacker movies, but also somewhere right in between the spontaneous joy of Your Sister’s Sister and the frustrating faults of Touchy Feely. What that means to you will probably depend on how strongly you respond to the genre and the creator.
Laggies is about a girl who’s probably somewhere in her late 20s, named Megan (Keira Knightley). After a decade or so of hanging out with the same group of friends she’s had since high school, Megan comes to realize that everyone she knows has turned into married, careered, dead-eyed yuppies, while she still feels that exploratory spark of youth and has yet to figure out what she wants her life to be. One proposal from her painfully earnest-though-lame longtime boyfriend (Mark Webber) later and Megan reaches a crisis point. Is she really ready to lock in to this kind of traditional existence? Retreating, our would-be hero ends up skipping out on her responsibilities and loved ones and holing up in the bedroom of a random high school girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who she meets outside of a liquor store. As if this wasn’t intrigue enough, even more conflict creeps into the picture when, after running away from her own problems, Megan then finds herself deeply involved in the troubles of not only this young girl, but also the frazzled-though-charismatic single father (Sam Rockwell) who’s been raising her.
Overall, Laggies is good but not great, though if there is one aspect of the film that elevates it above mediocrity and makes it worth seeking out, it’s the lead performance given by Knightley. She’s an actress who I’ve been hot and cold on in the past, but after what she accomplished here, I feel as though I’ve reached the point where I’m sold on her as a leading lady completely. Not only is she great at playing open-wound vulnerability (a refreshing change from all the repressed period picture performances of her early career) while letting every nuance of emotion that her character feels play over her naturally emotive face, but she’s also able to impress with the chemistry she’s able to conjure with her co-stars, which is just off the charts. Whether she’s lending an ear to Moretz’s confused kid or trading quips with Rockwell’s lonely adult, you absolutely believe in the onscreen relationships as they’re developed; which is essential to a movie like this whose premise is so inherently ludicrous. A movie about an adult hiding out in a teenager’s bedroom probably should have been a train wreck, but in the hands of the people involved here, it’s more like a train ride—maybe not the most exciting way to spend an afternoon, but it certainly has its charms.
