Sacramento, Michael Angarano’s second time acting in, directing, producing, and writing his own project, jogs memories of the much-acclaimed, higher-profile A Real Pain (2024). Coincidentally both shot in the spring of 2023, these not-quite-buddy comedies see two men — one outwardly steady and the other stressfully unpredictable — yoked together for a trip whose many frustrations eventually give way to better understandings of each other and themselves. I largely found A Real Pain grating, mostly on account of Kieran Culkin’s exhausting Oscar-winning performance as the stressfully unpredictable one of the duo, but I’d prefer watching it twice to Sacramento, a sometimes poignant but mostly generic dramedy about two growing-apart friends with a thinly sketched shared personal history working through late-30s angst with more common threads than either initially knows. 

Glenn (Michael Cera) is four-years-married to Rosie (Kristen Stewart), and they’re on the verge of two major life changes: she’s several months pregnant, and Glenn is expecting to soon get caught in a round of corporate layoffs that, for what it’s worth, won’t too catastrophically impact the pair’s finances: unwaveringly calm Rosie assures the anxiety-prone Glenn that she can carry them both until he finds another gig. Rickey (Angarano) is struggling to move past the death of his father, with whom he’d reconnected shortly before his passing after what’re implied to be years of estrangement, and he’s weighing another big commitment that, since the film treats it like a final-act twist, I won’t say here. 

A trip to Sacramento comes abruptly, as most things involving Rickey do. He arrives, with no notice, at Glenn and Rosie’s Los Angeles home eagerly demanding Glenn go on an impromptu guys trip to the six-hour-away city. This type of a-lot-to-ask spontaneity is part of why Glenn has been pulling away from Rickey lately. Another reason is the kind of manipulativeness and dishonesty that reveals, partway through the trip, that Rickey wants Glenn to actually come with him to Sacramento so that he can scatter his father’s ashes there. Glenn will find out later that Rickey’s father never actually set foot in Sacramento in his lifetime, that he died a year rather than a month ago, and that the stuff filling up a freshly emptied tennis-ball canister is the sand that fringed a gas-station parking lot and not ashes. Rickey would do anything, even purposely get the car they came in towed during an outing at a diner, to revive a once-close friendship dwindling into a one-meal-a-year check-in except be emotionally candid.

Angarano and his co-writer, Chris Smith, don’t give Rickey’s patience-testing faults compelling complexity: he’s a one-note, mostly irritating embodiment of immature arrested development. Glenn is the more interesting character of the two, intent on performing the sort of grown-up stability he doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t really have. (I liked the touch, even if it’s a more obvious attempt at characterological shading, where in moments alone Glenn calls, only to have his attempts ignored, men he’d like to consider closer friends than Rickey life updates we can tell they’re probably baffled to be getting.) 

Sacramento’s journey doesn’t consist of much besides superficial squabbling, postcard-pretty shots of sun-brightened on-location vistas and city sites, and a night out with a couple of barely amused women wrestlers written with a bemusing lack of flavor or incident. The movie is temporarily jolted awake by a third-act appearance from Maya Erskine as an exhausted-to-the-bone woman from Rickey’s past living with the consequences of the latter’s thoughtlessness. These scenes are the film’s finest, moving out of the joint pity party taking up most of the movie’s purview into something more immediate and challenging. I’d have liked more of them, and also more substantiveness to Stewart’s character, who doesn’t do much besides pad around the house and check in on her gloomy husband by phone. Sacramento mostly makes you notice what it lacks. 

Image credit: David Haskell