Aubrey Plaza Is My Old Ass in a Time-Tripping Coming-of-Age Movie

My Old Ass wastes no time in getting to its central conceit, as memorable as its title if not necessarily as original: Elliott (Maisy Stella) celebrates her 18th birthday camping with her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler), does some mushrooms, and gets a campfire visit from… Elliott, herself, from 21 years in the future, played – in one of those casting decisions that imagines a fundamental face-change between young adulthood and not-quite-middle age – by Aubrey Plaza. It’s easy to forgive the leap, because Stella and Plaza share an informal fluency in youthful insouciance that traverses their zoomer-millennial divide, and because generally speaking, you want to watch Aubrey Plaza in movies. Even when she’s playing the mom-defending, grad-school-attending normie adult in the room (or the woods), there’s electricity in her eyes.

It’s a bold decision, then, possibly even a miscalculation, to have Old Elliott disappear for much of the movie. She doesn’t leave behind a lingering question over whether what Young Elliott experienced is real, because the older version makes a gambit that pays off with the casualness of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay: She simply programs her future cell number into her younger self’s phone and the two are subsequently somehow able to share conversations across the yawning chasm of time (and without any hallucinogenic aid). For much of the movie, all we get is Plaza’s voice. For some crucial stretches, and much to her younger self’s chagrin, we only get her voicemail.

The metatextual mystery that emerges is whether or not this is part of writer-director Megan Park’s grand design for My Old Ass, a necessity borne out of Plaza’s presumably limited availability, or some kind of triangulation of various creative and logistical factors. Regardless, Elliott meets Elliott before the audience knows many details of her younger life, which are filled in later, rather than building up to a big sci-fi twist. This leaves the movie structurally interesting, and also more than a little wobbly – a shame, given the inviting conceptual breeziness that Park uses to introduce her version of time travel. Though there are intimations of future-world decay on the older Elliott’s end of the line, she tries to offer advice in a more casual, less meddling way than, say, the sequel-teasing end of Back to the Future. She remembers that her younger self itches to escape her small Canadian town for her impending college education in a city, and therefore simply and gently implores her(self) to spend a little more time with her family, now and later; not at the expense of her goals (or as a dire warning about impending illness, which younger Elliott understandably guesses when older Elliott starts going on about how great their mom is), but with an attempt at understanding that no matter what the outcome, time will always slip away. That said, the older Elliott allows herself one piece of stricter and more specific advice: Don’t get involved with anyone named Chad.

Younger Elliott has no Chad-related plans, not least because she identifies as gay, and in fact has dedicated much of her final summer to laying the groundwork for a hook-up with the cute girl at the coffee shop. But she does shortly meet a Chad (Percy Hynes White), possibly the Chad, in town to help on his family farm, and can’t quite shake him as instructed. There’s a playful contemporary zing to Elliott’s own confusion over her attraction to a boy after feeling like the matter of her sexuality was well and settled.

That superficial novelty – an idea that might have been offensive 30 years ago, whooshed into an unexpected declaration of sexual fluidity – also provides cover for how conventional a young-adult romance this is, how nakedly the movie uses Chad as a sweet-natured plot device rather than a person with his own dimensions outside of Elliott’s life story. There are reasons for that, sort of, yet Park doesn’t fully take advantage of Elliott’s dual perspectives to layer a story that’s essentially taking place in two different timelines, one tantalizingly invisible. For long stretches, My Old Ass retreats into the comforting familiarities of young love and life at a crossroads. When the urgency floods back into the movie in its final half-hour, it feels like too much, too late.

This shouldn’t diminish Stella’s performance – which in addition to being her first movie ever, must happen in the shadow of another, more famous actress who isn’t even actually there in many of her scenes. Her antsiness forms the soul of the movie, as well as the reason the more standard material doesn’t rankle further. She’s got such presence, in fact, that her obligatory pair of besties and various family members can’t help but feel insubstantial by comparison – far more wispy and elusive than, say, Plaza’s voice on the phone, and helping to make the movie feel more like a sweet but thin YA novel, and all of the earnest yearbookiness that entails. When Plaza reappears for a gutting later scene, it only makes the rest of the movie look more simplified, almost airbrushed; it doesn’t have the ruthlessness to set up an emotional sneak attack, or heedlessly embrace its own inventions. Even as Plaza’s character and presence nudges the movie out of its comfort zone, the youthful, romantic recklessness it tries to celebrate feels theoretical – a lesson, not a life.

Director: Megan Park
Writer: Megan Park
Stars: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maria Dizzia, Kerrice Brooks, Maddie Ziegler, Seth Issac Johnson
Release Date: September 13, 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 A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.