Snack Shack Finds a Fresh Angle on Tired Coming-of-Age Nostalgia

From their Amblin adventures to their sex comedies, no one seems willing to quit remembering the 1980s, especially when it means recalling the mainstreamiest and most shamelessly nostalgic output to ever hit the endless cultural recycling bin. So it seems like a major task – more major than it should, really – that Snack Shack pushes across the decade’s dividing line into the summer of 1991, one of those hybrid eras still heavily indebted to the aesthetics of the previous decade while containing hints of the pop culture still to come. When Snack Shack ends, Nirvana’s Nevermind is a few weeks from release. This is the summer that punk didn’t break.

Not that teenage besties A.J. (Conor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriele LaBelle, fresh off playing Spielberg’s avatar in The Fabelmans) are all that plugged into the music scene. Snack Shack joins them in the middle of ditching a class field trip to jump across state lines from Nebraska to Iowa, where they can engage in some off-track betting – the latest, it becomes clear, in a series of financial schemes and shenanigans that have A.J.’s parents seething with frustration, moreso when they later find the boys’ stash of homebrewed beer. (Parents of the more freewheeling Moose remain largely unseen and seemingly unconcerned.) Faced with the prospect of military school, A.J. gets a legit summer job, albeit a self-managed one: He and Moose buy (wildly overpay for, actually) the right to run the community pool’s snack stand for the summer, and set about wheeling and dealing their way toward profitability.

One of the funniest things about Snack Shack is how writer/director Adam Rehmeier seems just as invested as the boys in their venture. Maybe because he’s drawing on his own experiences growing up in Nebraska City, he’s downright eager to explore the ins and outs of the boys actually running their own refreshment stand, from suppliers to storage to on-the-fly upcharges. The enthusiasm is infectious, and for its energetic first half especially, the movie feels antic in the best way, full of retaliatory pranks, sneak attacks and running from the cops, somehow without descending into bro hell.

Snack Shack is produced by T-Street, a company co-founded by filmmaker Rian Johnson, and though Johnson’s name isn’t on the film, there’s an easy kinship between this one and his 2006 debut Brick. Though Johnson’s take on the teen movie steeped itself in the more esoteric language and complicated plotting of ’40s film noir, rather than the more accessible, crowd-pleasing sensibility of the ’80s coming-of-age comedy, it shares with Snack Shack a willingness to jump straight into the action without tutorials covering the teenagers’ slang and sensibilities. A.J. and Moose have a certain language somewhere between locker-room Wall Street, ’80s mallspeak and nascent tech-bro (“Can I pitch you something?” Moose frequently asks), and the movie never slows down to spell it all out. Snack Shack is also adept at portraying a teenage world somewhere between carefree bike-riding kid summers and heavier adult responsibilities – and seeing, as A.J. and Moose do, the inherent possibility of being old enough to want beer, too young to buy it yourself, and too reckless to know better.

It’s a romantic notion, so the movie’s temporary girl-next-door fantasy figure Brooke (Mika Abdalla), most specifically her tolerance for and romantic interest in A.J., is a forgivable fudge on Rehmeier’s part, further redeemed by Abdalla’s charming performance as a girl who knows how to neg her way into a gawky boy’s heart. That both A.J. and Moose seem unsure if they’re supposed to be her bratty little brothers or potential boyfriends provides a healthy, unspoken dash of realism to the oft-heightened proceedings.

It seems, very briefly, as if A.J. might face competition from Shane (Nick Robinson), an older pal returning from an abbreviated Gulf War tour, but he’s content to serve as a mentor with a parent-friendly reputation as a upstanding military hero. Good as Robinson is in the role – more effortless and relaxed than he has been playing any number of on-screen teen heroes – Shane is still the axis upon which the movie makes some ill-fitting turns into more serious territory. After wasting a fair bit of time on the halting push-pull between A.J. and Brooke, the movie’s sappier side feels far less developed than the entrepreneurial drive that keeps it humming for so long. This sentimentalization plagues so many nostalgia pieces aimed at ex-kids, though at least a movie that ultimately pushes its luck and stalls out befits the high-rolling teenagers at its center. Most of Snack Shack is a winning scheme. Must we learn a lot that summer, too?

Director: Adam Rehmeier
Writer: Adam Rehmeier
Starring: Conor Sherry, Gabriel LaBelle, Mika Abdalla, Nick Robinson, Gillian Vigman, David Costabile
Release Date: March 15, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.