Adult Beginners

Adult Beginners

Abrasive caricature is the specialty of comedian and actor Nick Kroll. His “Kroll Show” on Comedy Central was nothing if not relentless in its skewering of ego-driven minor media figures in every shape, size and sex they come in. He’s very good at what he does, but like most people who are very good at what he does, he can’t resist showing a softer side as a performer who could blame him? Except maybe Don Rickles (unless there was a “very special episode” of “CPO Sharkey” that I missed).

These days such performers stretch by starring in low-budget indie character-study type things that usually involve some kind of dysfunctional family dynamic. For Kroll, this takes the form of “Adult Beginners,” a film whose scenario was cooked up by none other than the comedian himself. Kroll plays Jake, a tech entrepreneur we meet living the high life of geek gurudom via venture capital: spouting blustery jargon, hoovering rails, inveigling the amorous affections of a not entirely bright young thing in ornate antique bathtub of a moneyed friend’s apartment.

But before Jake can seal that particular deal, the project that was going to make him millions flops before it’s even manufactured leaving him penniless, homeless and with many pissed-off affluent ex-friends.

So what else can he do but return to the bosom of his family, or what’s left of it: his ancestral home on Long Island now occupied by his sister Justine (Rose Byrne), her husband Danny (Bobby Cannavale) and their winsome adorable toddler Teddy (played by twin winsome adorable toddlers Caleb and Matthew Paddock). Another baby’s on the way for Justine, and she doesn’t mind letting Jake crash as long as he helps out around the house. Jake protests that he’s no good with kids arrogant, egocentric, endlessly snarky, he doesn’t seem to be much good with anything, frankly but a deal’s a deal. So he starts looking after the kid.

You see where this is going, don’t you? Well, sort of. There’s a reason why they say that the “character arc” in this movie is not new: obnoxious superficial person meets cute wide eyed thing and starts to change for the better, but then suffers some kind of awful relapse into obnoxious shallowness, making an even bigger mess than ever before and having to work even harder to prove that she or he really DID learn the Life Lesson that was right there in front of them all along.

Yes, that is pretty much what happens here; fortunately, though, it’s not done quite as predictably as it could have been. Actually, the most boring part of this film is when the awkward crank has to deal with the child.

But Kroll’s scenes with Byrne and Cannavale both crackle and sting particularly after Jake discovers some things about Danny and Justine’s marriage (some of which are true) and begins reckoning with his own selfishness during his mother’s illness. There are weak spots in Adult Beginners where it doesn’t carry enough weight to be a truly substantial movie it follows too many conventions of both character driven contemporary indie cinema of a certain ethnicity (the cast is filled out by name actors whose contributions are disappointingly circumscribed; Jane Krakowski plays a swimming instructor whose pool provides the film its title), while never becoming offensively generic either. If you’re a big fan of any one member of its trio of leads (I’m something of a Cannavale partisan myself), I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

Watch Adult Beginners For Free On Gomovies.