Tribeca 2025: Everything’s Going to Be Great Doesn’t Live Up to Its Title

Lester Smart (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is a 14-year-old boy with his sights set on acting, or writing and acting, or writing and acting and singing – something in the theater, something in New York. He’s closer to his dream than many, yet still pretty far afield; his parents Buddy (Bryan Cranston) and Macy Smart (Allison Janney) run local theater venues for a living, Buddy still hoping to maybe somehow work his way up to Broadway, or something like it. Lester works closely with them, but still has to audition for bit parts in their various productions. That’s how Lester develops what the audience for Everything’s Going to Be Great is meant to understand as an endearing, character-defining quirk: Though his roles are typically confined to a line or two, he often waits in the wings and, when nobody’s looking, inserts himself into additional scenes, often at the urging of his imaginary theater-world friends (Ruth Gordon tells him to go for it, and so on). Now, how jumping on stage without any lines to say or extra stage business to attend actually gives him a thrill is not really specified, to the point where it’s hard to believe he’d keep doing it. Surely a young man as exacting as Lester would notice that this derails scenes and doesn’t earn him rapturous attention. And if his parents are realistic enough to make him audition for even a tiny part, wouldn’t they also refuse to cast him if he habitually disrupts every production? Are we really expected to think of this as a lovable if misguided expression of yearning for a theatrical life, and not a stupid affectation?

The movie is not really about Lester wrecking local theater productions, but those questions still hang with increasing heaviness over Everything’s Going to Be Great. It may be that the film can’t stay in Lester’s head long enough to make his behavior make sense – even as some of his scenes feel interminable. Director Jon S. Baird splits the film’s point of view across the four-member Smart family: Lester, the middle-school misfit who hasn’t found kids his age he can relate to; Buddy, the blasé family cheerleader who truly believes things will work out; Macy, the more practical-minded half of the couple forced to make some hard decisions; and Derrick (Jack Champion), the good-looking older son who just wants to play football and lose his virginity, not learn elaborate tap numbers. He mouths the words to Gilbert and Sullivan singalongs in the car anyway; presumably, he can’t help it.