A couple of guys who’ve known each other since childhood but grew apart as adults decide to pack up their shared past and plentiful neuroses and take a trip together. Michael Angarano’s road-trip dramedy plots a similar course to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, and even sees him filling the same writer-director-star role as Eisenberg did in a story that revolves around a similar double act: Angarano plays an outgoing, unreliable type opposite Michael Cera as his more introverted, family-oriented friend. And while Sacramento is a sunnier, slighter affair than A Real Pain, it still makes for a pretty nice ride.
Glenn (Cera) is enjoying a quiet life in an L.A. suburb when his old friend Rickey (Angarano) jumps out of a tree and suggests they take a trip to Sacramento. It’s not a great time for Glenn to be hitting the road—he’s about to become a father, his work situation is looking precarious, and his mental health isn’t in the best place—but his wife, Rosie (Kristen Stewart), convinces him to go. She thinks that spending some time with an old friend might be good for him, though it seems like she might also just want him out of the house for a few days. The fact that his extremely pregnant partner is basically shooing him out the door tells us a lot about Glenn.
At first, Glenn seems like your typical Cera role: timid, unfailingly polite, and just a bit corny in a way that makes him extremely endearing. With his unblinking smile and awkward body language, he’s like a Muppet that somehow became human. Glenn’s introductory scene, where he plays an enthusiastic game of peekaboo with what’s soon revealed to be an empty crib, shows that Sacramento knows exactly how to deploy Cera’s particular comic talents.
But we quickly discover that there’s something darker going on beneath Glenn’s placid exterior. He has what he describes as “blackouts”—episodes that seem to be somewhere between a panic attack and a bout of silent rage where he briefly loses control of himself, often physically breaking things in the process, before snapping instantly back into his soft-spoken, Mr. Rogers-esque demeanor. Taking his usual, nebbish shtick and giving it this extra, angrier dimension makes for one of the most interesting performances of Cera’s career.
It helps that Glenn’s travel mate provides the actor with so many opportunities to tap into that latent rage. Rickey is a bit of a man-child who seems to think nothing of whisking his friend hundreds of miles away on a whim. He turns out to have a pretty flexible relationship with the truth—basically telling Glenn whatever he thinks will keep him on the road longer—and is general unwilling to take accountability for anything that he does. While they’re wildly different people, he and Glenn both have a tendency to use emotionally intelligent, therapy-friendly language in order to deflect criticism and avoid actually working on their flaws.
It would be hard to say that Glenn and Rickey learn much about themselves during their time on the road or that we learn much about them. Sacramento takes them on a pretty circular route where they end up more or less back where they started, both geographically and as people. The cheerfulness of the ending is actually a little unsettling given that Rickey is steadily revealed to be more or less an unrepentantly bad person while Glenn’s damage runs deep enough that he probably should not be left in charge of an infant. But so it goes.
Sacremento’s strength is that it knows how to keep things moving. That’s felt in everything from the rhythm to Glenn and Rickey’s bantering, to the way the camera delivers punchlines in scenes like the aforementioned peekaboo one or, later, when it frames Rickey in a long, fixed shot as he prattles away until Glenn finally becomes so fed up that he just walks clean out for the frame. And while Stewart and Maya Erskine—who plays a love interest of Rickey’s named Tallie—don’t get much screen time, they both make for excellent foils to the lead duo as the eminently reasonable women who for some reason have decided to put up with these hopeless men.
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