The Kings Of Summer

Nick Robinson and Gabriel Basso star as best friends who decide to spend their summer vacation living in the woods, away from their parents. Robinson, a daydreamer type, is frequently at odds with his widower father, played by Nick Offerman. Offerman is prickly and overbearing, though he’s a model of warmth and understanding compared to Basso’s parents, two shrill caricatures of alien adulthood played by Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson. Joining Robinson and Basso on their adventure is Moises Arias—an asexual, froglike weirdo partial to machetes and mock turtlenecks. Arias is less a character than a screenwriter’s folly, existing only to make non sequitur remarks.

The Kings Of Summer doesn’t take itself seriously; short of having the actors break character, it’ll do anything for a laugh. It leans heavily on interminable improv scenes and interminable montages edited from improv scenes. In other words, much of it plays like the outtakes reel that would be shown at the wrap party of a better, more tightly structured film. Certain bits fall flat, while others—say, any scene with Mullally and Jackson—grate. The humor’s tendency to veer into the surreal doesn’t help the movie seem any less inconsistent and scattered; without a sense of purpose, absurdist comedy can look an awful lot like sloppy filmmaking.