At long last, the tween queer coming-of-age comedy gets its masterpiece, courtesy of writer/director Nicholas Colia. Griffin in Summer somehow manages to encapsulate the strange obsession of an unrequited first crush, the ennui of living under a crumbling marriage, and the passionate drive to pursue one’s interests, whether they be popular or not. Between its zippy script and note-perfect recollections over-stuffed with relatable moments, the young cast give performances well beyond their years. Make no mistake, this is an excellent ensemble piece wherein each character greatly contributes to the whole, no matter how big or small their part may be; yet, Everett Blunck’s powerful star-making turn as Griffin somehow still manages to steal the show. Laugh-out-loud funny and brilliantly executed, Griffin in Summer makes the play of life into a grandiose affair virtually impossible not to love.
After turning heads at his school’s talent show—an exceedingly adult scene of a bickering married couple lifted directly from his play—fourteen-year-old Griffin wants to move full speed ahead on a “professional-level” production of Regrets of Autumn. This includes sixty-hour-a-week rehearsals, and full creative control deep into the summer months. Griffin describes his play as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe meets American Beauty, two references he should be way too young to have any legitimate grasp on. Somehow, everything about Griffin is wise beyond his years, as if he is an old man stuck in a younger child’s body. This includes Griffin’s aspirations to move to New York City the second he turns eighteen, his nerdy old-man fashion sense, and his reluctance to embrace any aspect of the childhood fun most of his friends yearn to be having. The latter particularly becomes a problem for launching Griffin’s play out of his basement—where Griffin demands a strict regimen and for his friends to come to rehearsals prepared, most of them have their summer minds elsewhere. The play’s director, Kara (Abby Ryder Fortson, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Ant-Man and the Wasp), snags a potential boyfriend who whisks her away to his family’s lake house, while Tyler (newcomer Gordon Rocks) shows up late to rehearsal because he is too distracted tweaking his “potato clock,” and the other two (Alivia Bellamy, Johanna Colon) are more interested in relationship drama and the tantalizing nature of a good hard seltzer.
As Griffin’s obsession continues to build over ensuring Regrets of Autumn will be a raging success, the situation at home worsens by the day. Griffin’s absentee father drives his workaholic mom (Melanie Lynskey, Yellowjackets, Rose Red) into ten different directions, needing to hire an errand boy to take care of a few things around the house. At first, Griffin cannot stand airhead Brad (Owen Teague, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Stephen King’s It), and his need to blast booming house music whilst working. Insisting that he “works from home,” Griffin tries to make a case, to no avail. Something major shifts once Griffin requests Brad’s help to move furniture in the basement for their rehearsal space. Griffin especially takes notice of Brad’s arms, his tattoos, his dreamy blue eyes… from then on, both the play and Griffin himself will be changed forever.
Perhaps I could be wrong, but I genuinely believe Griffin in Summer to be a first of its kind, in exploring a young boy’s attraction to a much older straight man who can never reciprocate those feelings. That still doesn’t stop Griffin from trying. He comes to some particularly outrageous lengths to pull Brad in, and nearly every move seems to work. Maybe it is just because Brad always stays high on edibles or very drunk from Griffin’s dad’s liquor stash; whatever the case, an undeniable bond of friendship begins to form between these two extremely different people. Nicholas Colia builds up many hilarious moments from this bond, reveling in the strangeness of the premise and the increasingly preposterous lengths that Griffin will go to keep Brad in his clutches. Brad desperately wants to get back to Bushwick, but he has been held back by a clingy high school girlfriend (Lisa Frankenstein‘s Kathryn Newton in a scene-stealing role with a funky accent) and a major lack of funds. The fact that Brad was from New York City was already enough of a lightbulb moment for Griffin, so the added facet of being a performance artist just takes it even further over the top. In one of the film’s signature sequences, Brad reveals a locked Vimeo video of his final performance before being forced to pack up and move back home to Borwood. To call the result unexpected would be an understatement—it is certainly far from the only time Teague leans into Brad’s intensity lurking just underneath the surface.
Another layer to the story lies in the metatextual play-within-a-movie. In the beginning, we do not truly grasp how much Griffin’s writing seeps itself with real-life nutrients. He weaves in moments of sweetness via his friendship with Brad, but the core characters in his play are directly pulled from his mother and father. Colia leans into the numerous overlaps, almost satirizing them with sincerity. Certainly, it provides an intriguing window into Griffin’s psyche. I also have to applaud the dodging of many tropes of queer stories, including wallowing in the sadness of a lonely lead, or glamorizing some elaborate coming out of the closet. While any of those are worth telling, they would not have fit here. Instead, Griffin appears accepted for who he is, though the lashing out at his friends who have agreed to help put on the play definitely becomes an issue as we build towards an altogether surprising climax. Can the opening night of Regrets of Autumn go off without a hitch?
The audience at the premiere ate up the movie like cake, and the cast could not have come across any sweeter if they tried at the Q&A afterward. That the movie was filmed in just twenty days shocked me, considering the sheer amount of child actors involved in the production. The easy rapport of the ensemble bled into the picture itself, making it an obvious passion project that will speak to outsiders everywhere. Sometimes, it is okay to not give a fuck about one’s nana. We have all been Griffin at points in our lives, pining over a person who may not even be worthy of our attention in the first place whether we initially realize it or not. Nicholas Colia and company have left us an instant classic worthy of revisiting over and over again, with or without a glass of scotch to wash it down.
Griffin in Summer premiered at 2024’s Tribeca Film Festival, and will hopefully be snatched up for distribution very soon.
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