Sacramento (2024)
Directed by Michael Angarano
Been a minute. Let’s see if I still have the juice.
Whether it’s students picked off the streets by masked vigilantes posing as government officials or a global trade war rooted in a fascist ideology, nothing about our present feels especially hopeful. Not to mention all of our daily, personal battles, ranging from the minute despair that comes from seasonal affective disorder or the bureaucratic agonies of working in medicine. And don’t get me started on the fiscal strain that comes from planning a wedding! It’s a stressful time to be alive.
It’s why I could sympathize with Glenn (Michael Cera). He and his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) are planning for the birth of their first child while living in Los Angeles. We see Glenn fixate on the crib he just assembled, jostling at its flimsy side panel, wondering why he spent hundreds of dollars on something so ramshackle. Whether it’s the stress getting to him or an undiagnosed case of obsessive compulsive disorder (undoubtedly both), we see him demolish the crib, ripping it apart from its hinges. Rosie can only look on aghast.
But before all that, there’s Ricky (Michael Anagarano), who we first observe camping solo. He encounters Tallie (Maya Erskine) from across a stream, where the two have their meet-cute moment. They go their separate ways, where we hear unreturned voicemails from Tallie, noting that Ricky is the father of their child. Ricky, meanwhile, resides in a mental health institution, dominating the conversation in group therapy as he knows all the rhetoric and terminology to diagnose others but lacks the self-awareness to remedy the mistakes that plague his past and inform his present. He’s a colossal fuck-up, coping with the loss of his father, and refusing to acknowledge his responsibilities. He returns to his old friend in Glenn, making up an excuse for the two to go on a bogus journey as they drive out to Sacramento for a weekend.
Angarano’s film maintains an admirable, off-kilter tone that refuses to provide simple explanations for his characters’ irrational emotions. Cera and Angarano blend well together as emotionally-stunted, nebbish types that don’t so much as complement each other as they simply co-exist, antagonizing each other during the six-hour trek. Both face their own internal anxieties, with Glenn concerned about losing his job (he does), to Ricky’s perpetual lies concealing his real motivations. Rosie remarks early in the film that Ricky is Glenn’s best friend, despite the fact that the two haven’t seen each other in over a year. It gets at the heart of what the film is about, wherein these two sad, detached millennial boys (disguised as men) find themselves lost because they haven’t been open with themselves, let alone one another.
Sacramento is a thoughtful-enough, perfectly acceptable piece of April indie fare that has the lasting impact of a notable weekend with an old friend. It reminded me of the people in my life that make all these rotations around the sun worth enduring, and served as a balm for our chaotic times. It had me thinking about the good of some of my present day anxieties; of how this upcoming wedding has reconnected me with old friends and turned acquaintances into confidants. The stressors that have assembled themselves into a tree-diagram of worry somehow seemed more endurable during the film’s runtime, where the sense that as difficult as some of life’s problems may be, it most certainly can be worse. And while we all brace for an impending recession, depression, war, or otherwise, I’m left to occupy the present day, and keep moving forward, knowing there’s still much left to be done. Kudos to any film that can get that out of me.