Show biz kids: "Theater Camp"

Theater Camp is Waiting for Guffman passed through Glee: softer, fonder, possessed of boundless performative moxie but only variable comic quality control. From that title on down, it's also very American. Expanding their 2020 short of the same name, writer-directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman offer a middling mockumentary on an East Coast rite of passage: the annual exodus that sees aspirant showbiz kids relocated to leafier, chichi-er sticks (in this case, a ramshackle venture in the Adirondacks) for a month or so of training in the ways of all things Lloyd Webber. Do we even have such camps here? Did we have them in the days before a decade of crippling arts cuts? At any rate, Gordon and Lieberman cast their demographic net with an early run of gags on the topic of Bye Bye Birdie. (Respond in any way to those, and you can consider yourself one of the club.) Then we meet the dramatis personae: the vlogging bro dude (American Vandal's Jimmy Tatro, emergent master of the clueless) drafted in to manage Adirond Acts after his mother falls into a coma, the salty site owner (Caroline Aaron) trying to keep the footlights on, the heads of performance (Gordon and Ben Platt) struggling to work through their own issues, and - last but not least - the kids, who to a child perform for the cameras as though this is a shopping-mall talent showcase rather than a valid opportunity for satire. During the onstage auditions process, one of these cherubs elects to perform "Defying Gravity", and he isn't going to let a mid-song power cut get in the way of his hitting the high notes.

Thereafter, the film's success will largely depend on how invested you are in the inner workings of an American theatre camp. We're spending the hour before the inevitably chaotic opening night (the premiere of "Joan, Still", the Platt and Gordon characters' tribute to the camp's bedridden founder) watching bitty, underwritten, semi-improvised scenes that desperately hope enthusiasm is an acceptable substitute for wit; these fumble through modestly promising set-ups to arrive at generally shrugging punchlines. (If the film speaks at all to our present, strikebound moment, what it has to say is this: actors would be nothing without good writers and directors to guide them.) The cosiness - a small band of performers who've known one another since youth, amusing themselves by recreating a world they know like the backs of their tearstick-coated hands - manifests in a look you could fairly describe as TV-adjacent: Gordon and Lieberman lean heavily on those faux-surveillance scenes shot through open blinds that have signalled growing intimacy (or trouble) in texts from The Office to Abbott Elementary. After the grand scale and goofy ambition of Greta Gerwig's Barbie, there's something grounding about watching a movie that unspools like four consecutive episodes of a soon-to-be-cancelled sitcom, or which reminds you of what had started to pass for studio comedy in the post-Apatow era. Sporadic smiles (the bulk of those care of Minari's Alan Kim as the one kid who's showed up at camp with designs on becoming an agent), but a sum total of zero big laughs, almost certainly because everyone involved owes camps like Adirond Acts a formative debt.

Theater Camp is now playing in cinemas nationwide.