Growing Up and Other Lies

As the juvenile shenanigans of Growing Up and Other Lies gradually taper off and make room for more adult concerns, the “ah, I see what they’re getting at” thoughts begin settling in. It’s around this time you can imagine the movie’s creators have taken the “Don’t grow up, it’s a trap” bit of wisdom from the Peter Pan sector of the Internet and clunkily but earnestly turned it into a familiar, modest theme: “Growing Up Is Inevitable. Accept it.”
It’s a sobering, if not entirely convincing take from a film that charts the walking journey of four friends—Jake, Gunderson, Billy and Rocks—from the tip of Manhattan in a quest to cover its stretch of 260 blocks, north to south. The occasion is a last hurrah of sorts for the foursome as it also marks Jake’s farewell, a chance to hang with his best buds before moving to Indiana to help his aging father.
Right from the time we meet them, each of these characters are broadly defined and depicted, some more so than others. Which makes sense since none of them comes off as a human being equipped for the responsibilities of what we associate with adult life. They are caught between adolescence and the self-awareness that follows, friends who can’t help but roughhouse and verbally one-up each another as they gallivant and offer scatological hypotheticals for their own amusement.
As it follows them, Growing Up and Other Lies employs a conglomeration of styles—handheld camera, brief but steady tracking shots—that never cohere stylistically or thematically. But they mark the effort of directors trying different things, bringing a welcome energy to this rough-around-the-edges film. That energy lifts it from a rut of bro antics into scenes that add layers of recognizable complexity to its characters—the impulsive, ill-considered kiss during a family get-together; a melancholy heart-to-heart between former lovers during a child’s outdoor birthday party.
Some of the faces and names here will be familiar. Wyatt Cenac, perhaps best known as a correspondent for The Daily Show, is, depending on your tolerance for nonstop sarcasm, either the funniest or the most grating of the quartet. As Gunderson, he affects an air of practiced, jaded cool, his every quip dripping with insincerity.