Megan Burch, Keira Knightley’s protagonist in Laggies, is a 28-year-old with privileged problems. It’s been 10 years since Burch graduated high school, but she’s still stuck in the same emotional place — unmarried, with the same steady boyfriend, upper-middle-class parents and a menial job flipping signs for her father’s accounting firm (a provincial job, though it must be said that if all sign-flippers looked like Knightley, CPAs’ businesses would boom). Every time she’s supposed to attend a development seminar, she dodges it, and she makes inappropriate jokes at the expense of her tight circle of high-school friends, all of whom have matured into adulthood.
Burch is too old to be this shiftless — to be perpetually “floating,” as she puts it, waiting for some spark of inspiration to strike her like lightning. When her saintly, infinitely patient boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes to her at a friend’s wedding, she panics, fumbles through an excuse to leave the dance floor and drives off to a grocery store, where she helps a clutch of high-schoolers buy alcohol. She sees herself in them, especially the gang’s leader, Annika (the ubiquitous Chloe Grace Moretz). A few days later, with plans to finally attend a weeklong career seminar before eloping with Anthony to Las Vegas, Burch decides instead to crash with Annika, whose home conveniently includes a raffish and handsome single father (Sam Rockwell). You can finish the rest of the story yourself.
Written and directed by Lynn Shelton, a mumblecore auteur graduating to studio filmmaking, Laggies is a film about a regression into adolescence, but it’s regressive in other ways, too — equating self-actualization with assimilation into a nuclear family. The movie is dangerously backward, and poor Knightley has to suffer through reams of embarrassing dialogue to reach the rotely inevitable conclusion. Her character doesn’t evolve so much as conform to an ideal, one of the film’s many superficial insights that Shelton doesn’t seem to understand.
The others are facile and obvious, filled with self-congratulatory irony: The 18-year-old girl with more knowledge of life than the 28-year-old escaping it. Ho-hum. Or Burch’s father (Jeff Garlin), whom she witnesses engaging in an extramarital tryst, taking responsibility and coming clean, his confession calculated to really be about his daughter’s choices as much as his. How profound. We are indeed a long way from the casual authenticity and ragged charms of Shelton’s best work, like 2012’s Your Sister’s Sister.
There are winning moments in Laggies, here and there, when the director’s genuine command of discomfort chafes against the rigid formality of the movie’s insipid romantic-comedy structure. The best of those is a cameo by Gretchen Mol as Bethany, Annika’s estranged mother, a lingerie model who abandoned her family and, appropriately enough, has nothing to say when her daughter decides to show up at her door like an unwanted package.
The expression on Mol’s face, a mixture of shock, disappoint and shame, finally pulls you into the film’s emotional center. Lacking the maternal gene, Bethany buys off her daughter with free lingerie samples, sending her home with consolation prizes instead of love. It’s a remarkable scene, and you begin to wish that relationship was the main subject of Laggies, not the pitiful 20-something slacker’s quest for ersatz maturity.
LAGGIES. Director: Lynn Shelton; Cast: Keira Knightley, Sam Rockwell, Chloe Grace Moretz, Mark Webber, Jeff Garlin, Ellie Kemper, Kaitlyn Dever, Gretchen Mol; Distributor: A24; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters.