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Scottish director Jon S. Baird jumps from an Apple TV+ biopic to a stripped-down dramedy in Everything’s Going To Be Great, his follow-up to 2023’s moderately well-received Tetris. Ironically, watching his newest film attempt to fit all its thematic pieces into a satisfying whole is kind of like watching someone play a game of Tetris. The film follows the Smart family, an eclectic clan of struggling theater fanatics led by patriarch Buddy (Bryan Cranston), who attempts to imbue his same creative fire and joie de vivre into his wife, Macy (Allison Janney), and sons Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Derrick (Jack Champion), the former being a fellow thespian and the latter a would-be footballer struggling to be the odd man out in a family of eccentrics. At face value, the idea of the charismatic jock being the outsider of his family is an amusing dynamic, and Champion’s performance is far more compelling than that of his character’s histrionic brother. However, as with most of the threads in Everything’s Going To Be Great, it’s just one of many underdeveloped aspects of a film which is like a plate of spaghetti thrown at a wall, then presented to someone as a meal.
The Smarts start their story in late-’80s Akron, Ohio, financially besieged amidst Buddy’s dreams of being a stage-show success story. But he soon finds a potentially lucrative opportunity: turn a theater in New Jersey into a hit, and get a five-year deal at a more profitable venue in Milwaukee. It’s a gamble, but the family has become used to putting all their chips into Buddy’s harebrained schemes, being carted from place to place as he grasps at his dreams. For her part, Macy admires her husband’s go-getting spirit while quietly harboring resentment over being forced to live as his “normie” wife. This lifestyle is more favorable to the starry-eyed Les, who dodges gay slurs at his high school while envisioning pep talks from dead playwrights and stage actors like Noël Coward and Ruth Gordon. Meanwhile, all Derrick wants to do is stay somewhere long enough to lose his virginity and join a football team.
Two of Everything’s Going To Be Great‘s most frustrating faults are its vague time-hopping and lack of coherency regarding character relationships and story developments. There is little flow in the script (penned by I, Tonya scribe Steven Rogers) as it moves from the family’s first flop play, to their growing friendships with their cast members (played by Simon Rex and Carolyn Scott), and then their seemingly overnight success, with no tangible establishment of time passing aside from two subsequent intertitles which let the audience know that all of this has somehow been happening in less than a year. Characters are wont to talk about things that have happened without ever showing them, and the audience isn’t able to properly connect with them anyways, because of how impatient the screenplay is to move on.
Baird, though, is inclined to create a film as unconventional as his characters. He suffuses a light surrealism into Everything’s Going To Be Great through Les’ visions of dead stage greats (which come with cheeky freeze-frames and on-screen titles to note names and lifespans), along with two brief “breaking out into song” moments. It’s transparently strained, a hack pretending to be avant-garde (see Baird’s 2015 film Filth)—to have some distinct artistic vision—which is at odds with a film that is so scattershot, disjointed, and rote. The tonally unfocused film starts off as a family dramedy that veers into tragic drama, all the while dappled with out-of-place stylistic quirks. And its jokes only take the easiest possible shots: The film opens with an extended bit about how Les is afraid of vaginas (you know, because he’s a theater kid so he might be gay).
Janney and Cranston are the film’s highlights, even though there is something more annoying than charismatic about Cranston’s performance. But it’s hard to overstate just how insufferable Ainsworth is as Les. Ainsworth is asked to say some truly baffling lines, and does so unconvincingly. The film’s primary antagonist, he’s supposed to be a sympathetic, theatrical nonconformist, but is as obvious and forced as the film he’s a part of, and he is so frequently out of pocket that he’s downright hateable. One mostly feels sympathy for Derrick, who just wants to be a normal teenager, and a shared resentment towards his unconventional family.
Everything’s Going To Be Great tries to tackle ideas related to perceptions of success, acceptance, family, religion, love, homosexuality, and probably some other things thrown in there too. But there is no commitment to any of them. Instead, the film concludes on simplistic, nebulous notes of “It’s ok to be yourself” and “Family is important.” These are paltry takeaways considering what the characters have been through over the course of the film, especially Les, whose experiences with homophobic harassment and questions of identity are simply prodded at by Baird and Rogers. Just as Les tries desperately to fit in, Everything’s Going To Be Great wants desperately to be something that it’s not—it just lacks the focus and creativity to get there.
Director: Jon S. Baird
Writer: Steven Rogers
Starring: Allison Janney, Bryan Cranston, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Jack Champion, Simon Rex, Chris Cooper
Release Date: June 20, 2025
