Taking Lemons and Making Lymelife

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The suburbs...Where normal means dysfunctional. Where slow-aged middle managers get that full-body finish. Where how many prescriptions you fill is proportional to the square footage of your house. Where looking out the window in the afternoon is as entertaining as watching Lifetime. Where the universe is obviously expanding. Where pets are treated better than people. And where cleanliness being next to godliness is about as beautiful an adage as dust collecting on test tubes.

The 90s had a whole string of movies that took these places, where the puddles meet the pavement (last one I promise), and stomped boots down to see where the mud would fly. Stemming from movies like Short Cuts, Ordinary People, and later, The Ice Storm, the genre really settled down during the home owning craze of the 1990s, which spit out about a thousand movies I don't really care to recall without a six-pack of jelly donuts on hand. Once American Beauty hit, I think we collectively decided we'd had our fill, and independent movies started added offbeat themes to the genre: Donnie Darko, Juno, Punch-Drunk Love, or something with a school shooting or a briefcase full of money or a young homosexual growing into new jeans. They weren't just about midlife crises anymore. And that was fine.

And in 2009, a time where a house in the suburbs feels less like a place near good schools and more like a stack of Nordstrom credit cards next to an air mattress, we get Lymelife. It's directed by Derick Martini and features an excellent off-the-bench cast, including Rory Culkin, Emma Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton and executive produced by Martin Scorsese. It's about Scott (Rory Culkin), his ripping-at-the-perforated-seams family, trying to get his beautiful neighbor to like him without shamefully sacrificing his awesome Star Wars collectibles, and New Jersey.

If American Beauty is the house with the bright red door, Lymelife is the pool house and the shed.

Taken in snapshots, there's nothing interesting about this movie. It's set in the late 70s (God, again with the 70s?). The older brother comes back home on leave from the military and ends up in Oedipal shoving matches with the father. Rory Culkin's character, Scott, is in love with his long-time friend, Adrianna, who's too busy dating an older boy named Blaze to give him the attention he deserves. His overprotective mother duct tapes his clothes to avoid ticks and Lyme disease. And so on, and so on. Despite these clichéd scenes and being nearly a decade late with the genre, Lymelife works.

Rory Culkin and older brother Kieran (of the excellent Igby Goes Down) are shaping up to be reliably good actors. If they keep learning, manage their careers tightly, and get a bit of luck, they could grow up to be Leonardo DiCaprios. Teaming up with Rory's cool youth character are strong supporting roles, plenty of good humor, loose ends left nicely untied, original music that only barely borders on being too indie lo-fi, a healthy modesty of purpose, and the discipline not to make it seem like these two Jersey families are somewhow indicative of a whole generation of people. I'm sure someone along the line said, "hey you should end with one of those bird's eye shots where the camera rises to show endless rows of cookie-cutter houses." Lymelife being a strong little flick leads me to believe that guy was promptly fired.

Starts Friday, April 24 at Embarcadero Center Cinema. Info.