Michael Cera Annoys His Townie Sisters in Observant Indie Dramedy The Adults

True to its small, sometimes nearly microscopic, scale, The Adults draws a perfect miniature portrait of a highly specific demographic: People obsessed with doing bits, making up songs, and perpetuating their own inside jokes who nonetheless never turned to a life in the performing arts. Eric (Michael Cera) is first seen puttering around a bland hotel room, setting up his laptop and fussily bringing out a portable speaker as he halfheartedly futzes around with plans during what is clearly a quick visit to his hometown. He fits Cera’s persona: Halting, soft-spoken, harassed (“That’s still how you hug people?” his sister asks him derisively), patchy beard, and passive-aggressive – maybe even secretly a bit rude.

Put him next to his sisters Rachel (Hannah Gross) and especially Maggie (Sophia Lillis) for a prolonged period, however, and he’s performing accents, characters, and full-fledged Broadway-style songs that would seem mostly inscrutable to an outside viewer. Writer-director Dustin Guy Defa understands that in this case, we’re all outside viewers, getting a peek at another family’s shtick – and lets it run on anyway, bravely refusing to offer exposition that, of course, wouldn’t naturally occur when three siblings are alone together.

“Alone together” is particularly fitting for this trio; their parents are both dead, their mom more recently, and Rachel lives in the family home, apparently her mixed-bag reward for caring for her mother toward the end. Maggie still lives in the same semi-upstate New York town; she’s college-aged, but no longer attending. Eric has escaped to Portland, for some kind of job he refers to vaguely but consistently, and Rachel resents him – less for leaving than for not maintaining a stronger bond in his absence. Maggie, meanwhile, adores her older brother, which makes Rachel fume even more.

That’s most of the movie right there: Rachel fumes, Maggie looks alternately adoring and heartbroken, and Eric dodges and fusses his way through an extended visit. He keeps pushing back his departure date because of a weird, nagging insistence on finding local poker games via an old friend he seems to contact entirely because of his poker connection. At first, it seems like these increasingly high-stakes late-night games are a pathway toward a gradual revelation about a gambling addiction, but if this vice looms large in his Portland life, the movie withholds that information. It seems more likely that it’s a manifestation of a self-importance he can’t find in whatever his job is supposed to be. It’s also a form of control: He stays in town longer, as his sisters both want him to, but only on his halting terms that cannot be planned around.

It’s a well-honed piece of character writing, as is the amateur-vaudeville world Eric periodically resurrects to curry favor with Maggie. To some extent, The Adults is a poor man’s Noah Baumbach movie; it loses the New Yorkiness (and, perhaps moreso, New Yorkeriness) that vexes the more Baumbach-skeptical, but also isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny in its lacerations, which are fewer and further between. It has a short-story quality, and defies The New Yorker a second time; it feels more like something that would turn up in McSweeney’s if it was by someone famous, or The Westchester Review if it wasn’t. The flipside of Defa’s meticulous avoidance of melodrama is a movie that sometimes appears to be skirting conflict.

What keeps the movie from crumbling into melancholy dust are the performances, and not just in the moments where the actors are required to do prolonged funny character voices – weird bits that need to seem durable enough to survive decades and flimsy enough to convey that these aren’t even really theater kids. (At one point, Maggie recalls they performed one of their songs relatively recently: “Christmas… eight years ago.”) Cera could have notched so many generic buddy comedies or straight-to-streaming rom-coms by now, but his commitment to playing more believable, uncomfortable characters never flags. Gross and Lillis (the latter having the most current experience with the Big Hollywood machine given her appearances in Dungeons & Dragons and It) are similarly rooted and believable; it’s a trio of can’t-catch-them-acting performances, even when the characters are performing for each other. The Adults understands how often adulthood feels like that: A series of performances that those closest to you know are just screwing around.

Director: Dustin Guy Defa
Writer: Dustin Guy Defa
Starring: Michael Cera, Hannah Gross, Sophia Lillis
Release Date: June 13, 2023 (Tribeca) / August 18, 2023 (commercial release)

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.