Sacramento is actor Michael Angarano’s second directorial effort, and while it is not as memorable as other comedies about male friendships, it does have a certain charm that is tailor-made for fans of indie millennial-minded comedies.

It’s hard to set your film in Sacramento without a certain giant taking up all the air in the room. Greta Gerwig’s 2017 coming of age masterpiece Lady Bird captures the underrated city beautifully, with romantic shots of the Tower Bridge at sunset, the Fab Forties, and McKinley Rose Garden. It’s become so synonymous with the city that the California tourism board advertises a tour that takes you around prominent markers of the film. How does Michael Angarano’s Sacramento capture and interpret the city? 
While the consequential events of the film take place in the titular city, much of Sacramento is about the six hour drive from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Drifter Rickey (Michael Angarano) convinces his more straight-laced, dad-to-be friend Glenn (Michael Cera) to make the trip to Sacramento to scatter Rickey’s father’s ashes. I’ve done the drive from Sacramento to Southern California many times. You’re cramped in a car with the sun baking through the glass. You pass a lot of farmland blanketed in dried grass, refracting white light everywhere. At rest stops you can look out at nothingness, punctured by gas stations and fields. Rickey and Glenn’s drive to Sacramento captures the beauty of this drive, wrapped in warm color grading and cozy guitar strums.

Director/star Michael Angarano gathers a great quartet with our main cast. Michael Angarano remains endearingly sweet, a hallmark of his memorable performance in The Knick. Kristen Stewart is such a natural in her role as heavily pregnant wife to Glenn, adding to the diversity of performances that make up her varied filmography. The depiction of her pregnancy feels authentic. She is independent and there’s a little detail of her resting her phone on her stomach when on speakerphone. Kristen Stewart proves time and time again that she is one of our most authentic, natural actors. Maya Erskine is essential to the film’s surprise in the third act. She’s hilariously blunt, rounding out this cast. We never see Kristen Stewart and Maya Erskine interact in the film, and it’s a bit of a missed opportunity. Their energies in the film are quite different, and I would have liked seeing these temperaments collide.

Cera gets the most to do in the film. Cera’s performances often involve awkward naivety to the point of comedy, found in his roles in Superbad, Barbie, and Arrested Development. We’re introduced to Michael Cera with him doing peekaboos to the camera. This quickly turns to aggression, as he destroys the crib of his son. Cera’s performance is filtered through an intense pent-up anger. Both Angarano and Cera are essentially playing “man children”, in their own ways. The filmmakers attempt to intercept accusations of these men being obnoxious, even unlikeable characters, with a line from Stewart in an early scene. While heavily pregnant, she tells Glenn: “I shouldn’t have to take care of you.” 

Cera, unsurprisingly, gets many of the laughs of the film. Kristen Stewart’s deadpan delivery also got many chuckles out of my audience. Angarano finds funny moments in “therapy-speak” and men’s obsession with push-up contests. A pivotal scene of our stars dumping Rickey’s dad’s ashes at the Tower Bridge in Sacramento is successfully goofy.  

The film grapples with modern-day male friendships and the conflicts that arise when attempting to sustain said friendships in an increasingly isolated world. Sideways and The Banshees of Inisherin are two of the greatest films to come out of the “male friendships canon”, but Sacramento’s middling conflicts can’t rise to these greats. There is a college friend subplot with Glenn that sputters out, and the two fight scenes between the co-stars are lacking. The film is similarly centered around millennial anxieties around fatherhood. Without giving away a twist, there’s a scene of quiet judgement from Cera that he excels in, articulating the viewer’s own mood. Glenn quietly asks Rickey “Aren’t you ashamed?” in this scene, and Cera’s delivery of this line is a highlight of the film.  

Sacramento attempts to use its strong cast to create a comedy about common millennial worries, but only manages to capture some of that warmth as it struggles with a muddled conflict. 

Grade: C

Oscars Prospects:
Likely: None
Should be Considered: Best Original Screenplay

Where to Watch: In Select Theaters