If you've been involved with the alternative rock scene, you've met a guy like Sam, the reluctant protagonist of True Adolescents. Sam is 34 and plays to a dwindling, weeknight audience with the Effort, whose '80s guitar sound suggests a bar-band U2. As he roams his demimonde of used record shops, coffee houses and streets whose phone poles are plastered in posters, everyone appears to him as a sell-out. Gainful employment is just not his thing. After being kicked out by his girlfriend, who has grown tired of so much seriousness about so little, Sam takes refuge with his aunt and winds up chaperoning her 14-year old, Oliver, and his friend, on a weekend camping trip.
Shot in Seattle and the Cascade Mountains by filmmaker Craig Johnson, True Adolescents (out Aug. 30 on DVD) is a mildly amusing, occasionally moving character study of a lost soul. While it's difficult to judge whether Sam is more or less mature than Oliver, the story avoids the Hollywood approach to the man-child with child scenario. It's not a gross-out competition, but a lost-in-the-woods situation that might actually happen among irresponsible, self-centered people. The resolution is open ended: Is Sam a loser for putting off joining an adult society that, truth be told, isn't so hot?
True Adolescent's musical adept soundtrack is provided by Band of Horses, the Black Keys and Devendra Banhart.