Coming-of-age stories come in all shapes and sizes. The term refers to a story of someone going through a particularly age-specific moment of growing up, but it doesn’t always lean toward the light-hearted. Films like The Young Arsonists (2023) or Beautiful Beings (2023) would never be mistaken for soft tales of adolescence; whereas, Blood Relatives (2022) offers a supernatural twist on the genre by not only making it about parenthood via delayed growing up, but centers a decades-old vampire. Then there are the ones that have entered into our global lexicon, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), or that should be added, like Spontaneous (2020), Turning Red (2022), and Goodbye, Don Glees! (2022), which each use elements of the extra-ordinary to explore love, life, and what it means to begin the transition into adulthood. Writer/director Nicholas Colia (Alex and the Handyman) is the latest storyteller to add such a tale into the mix with his feature-length debut, dramedy Griffin in Summer, having its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2024, with a story of awakening that leans into the grey area of when we’re still children in need of guidance and protection despite all of our protests that we’re ready for adulthood.
Everett Blunck as Griffin in GRIFFIN IN SUMMER. Photo courtesy of Vanishing Angle/Tribeca Film Festival.
Each summer, young playwright Griffin (Everett Blunck) gets together with his friends Kara, Winnie, Tyler and Pam (Abby Ryder Fortson, Johanna Colón, Gordon Rocks, and Alivia Bellamy, respectively) to produce one of his plays. His latest project, Regrets of Autumn, is the biggest he’s ever done and he has visions of it playing on a proper stage in their small town. But his big dreams butt against reality as his friends have other priorities for the summer that make pre-production and rehearsals hard; struggles made worse when his mother, Helen (Melanie Lynskey), hires a friend’s recently moved back home son, Brad (Owen Teague), to do some odd jobs around the house and the dude keeps ruining Griffin’s work flow. However, when Griffin discovers that Brad’s similarly artistically-inclined, a bond forms that kicks up something within Griffin that he’s not sure how to handle.
Unlike recent films like Love, Simon (2018), which centers a closeted gay lead grappling with the choice of staying hidden or not amid fears of what his closest friends and family might say or do in response, Colia’s Griffin is uninterested in such matters. This isn’t to imply that the film doesn’t care or lacks a viewpoint regarding the LGBTQIA+ community, it’s that the film doesn’t differentiate between straight love or gay love. By treating them equitably, they become non-issues and, therefore, things that the script doesn’t need to either justify or spend time exploring. People are people, love is love, and first-loves are universal. Here, it comes as a shock because Griffin is the sort of 14-year-old who doesn’t believe in love. As introduced in the film, his writing is intense, adult, and articulate, exploring concepts of heartbreak and infidelity usually left to Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire), but missing authenticity. It’s mimicry without the lived experience to make it real. That’s the journey that Griffin is on, to awake the part of himself that he lacks — the belief that love can be real and that allowing yourself to be vulnerable to such a thing takes far more courage than sense. As written by Colia, Griffin is initially understood to be uptight and domineering, but, through patience, we come to realize something deeper: it’s a shield by which to protect his heart and the writing is the method by which he forges the armor. Where some coming-of-age tales rely on their vibes, their whimsy, their thematic energy to bring their story to life, Colia grounds his so deeply that the way we see Griffin shifts as we gain information on him that helps us see the world through his eyes. What is first a domineering child, someone ahead of his time (maybe, possibly?), is actually someone who feels they need to grow up quickly in order to escape. Most importantly, Colia trusts the audience to figure it all out without spoon-feeding us or coddling Griffin, creating an experience that never once talks down to its subject or target audience, solidifying itself as a coming-of-age tale that can last.
L-R: Owen Teague as Brad and Everett Blunck as Griffin in GRIFFIN IN SUMMER. Photo courtesy of Vanishing Angle/Tribeca Film Festival.
The young Blunck carries the film well, a young actor with only five other films under his belt as of 2022, the recent Outlaw Posse (2024) and Blood for Dust (2023) among them. Blunck forms a character whose rough exterior belies the softness underneath. It’s a coming-of-age tale so there’s going to be some kind of awakening, some realization, that elicits change of one kind or another; that’s the way the subgenre works. Blunck, however, gives us a character that may as well be Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets (1997) — jaded, angry, and thinking that their lived experience is enough to guide their writing. When Blunck’s line-delivery doesn’t sting, his stiff physical performance that dare not crease his outfits dares to cut us. These are some aspects which soften or sharpen as he spends time with Brad. But just as first loves have a tendency to blind us or confuse reality, Blunck’s performance ensures that where his vision is blurred, ours is not, so we can see the warning signs of his inappropriate romantic ideas. Another gift of Colia’s is that the no one needs to tell us that the relationship between Griffin and Brad is a bad idea, it’s baked into the script from the jump. But through Blunck’s creation of Griffin, we still want him to have a happy ending, whatever that looks like at that age, in that place.
Not alone in the film, Blunck is supported by a gathering of actors who help make the world feel lived in. Lynskey (Coyote Ugly; Yellowjackets) plays his distracted mother Helen, a real estate professional whose single-parenting it for most of the film and thereby distracted from Griffin’s summer love. Helen’s story appears like a B- or C-plot from the outset, but Lynskey brings that special quality that endears us to Helen well before we realize the significance of her story as it relates to Griffin’s. As his close friend and director of his play, Fortson (Ant-Man; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.) transitions from a character coming into their own to one who is in command of who she is, a role which requires someone who can not be diminished by the almost over-powering energy that Griffin can give off. As the love interest, Teague (Montana Story; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) plays Brad as obtuse, but not in a way in which he’s dangerous, but as so self-absorbed and internally focused that he’s unaware of Griffin’s affections. Teague’s ability to do this convincingly helps make Brad more than someone Griffin desires to grow closer to or simply use as a muse, but transforms the character into another version, an older version, of Griffin whose desire to create art above all else can come with unexpected and dire consequences. If there’s a complaint about the supporting cast, it’s that there’s not enough Kathryn Newton (Ant-Man: Quantumania; Lisa Frankenstein) doing some fantastic scene-stealing character work and that she never shares the screen with fellow-Cassie Lang Fortson. (Ok, that’s two complaints, but I kept hoping for it.)
Melanie Lynskey as Helen in GRIFFIN IN SUMMER. Photo courtesy of Vanishing Angle/Tribeca Film Festival.
First loves are incredibly hard in real life and are almost always hard to nail in fiction, too. They become these defining things for us, shaping how we approach the next relationship and all the ones after that. They can inspire course-correction, which can lead to over-correcting that ultimately dooms a coupling before it has a chance to develop. In fiction, with coming-of-age stories at least, there’s a sense of finality, of specific growth that helps convey that the character is somehow better off than they were whether the romance works out or not (Summer ‘03; The Edge of Seventeen). Here, in as much as is possible in a dramedy, Colia delivers a conclusion that not only feels authentic and earned, it gives audiences of any orientation something to think on and explore within themselves. By not segregating or delineating itself as specifically a gay story, but just being a love story, Colia provides an opportunity for young audiences grappling with unfortunate discrimination to see that there is art for them, representation for them, and that they are seen and valued, an aspect of worth in a day and age wherein too many give a damn about what people do in private.
Screening during Tribeca Film Festival 2024.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca 2024 Griffin in Summer webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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