In the days since the world premiere of Griffin in Summer at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, I’ve seen adjectives like “annoying” and “sociopath” hurled at its 14-year-old protagonist, Griffin Naffly (played by Everett Blunck). And maybe they’re true— at least, the annoying part certainly is. But isn’t it a core trait of a teenager to be at least a little annoying some of the time?
That’s one thing that Nicholas Colia, the writer and director of Griffin in Summer, gets right in his feature directorial debut, a coming-of-age comedy which zeroes in on a specific kind of personality and what happens when his world as he knows it is rocked over the course of one summer. From the moment we meet Griffin, on stage at a school talent show, we can tell he isn’t like the other kids his age. Rather than singing off-key to an oldies hit, Griffin— a playwright— performs all the parts in a scene from his play Regrets of Autumn, an adult divorce drama he describes as a cross between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and American Beauty. Griffin and his friends spend every summer mounting one of his plays, but this year, they all seem a little detached, more excited over getting drunk off hard seltzer and going to camp. Even Griffin’s sympathetic best friend Kara (the great Abby Ryder Fortson of last year’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, admittedly rather underused here) would rather be spending time with her new boyfriend. Griffin— the sort of buttoned-up type who’s always wearing collared shirts and seems to communicate exclusively through email— takes it out on them in increasingly frustrated outbursts. But his life begins to shift when his mom (Melanie Lynskey) hires an attractive twenty-something handyman named Brad (Owen Teague) to help take care of their pool while she is busy with work and Griffin’s father is away. It turns out that Brad is a failed performance artist from New York, and when he shows even the slightest interest in Regrets of Autumn, Griffin leaps at the chance to center the show around him— while perhaps dealing with some burgeoning feelings of his own.
Griffin in Summer isn’t exactly a queer coming-out or coming-of-age story, although Griffin’s sexuality certainly plays in to his relationship with Brad. The more unattainable Brad appears— moving back to New York, hanging out with his vapid girlfriend (played by an over-the-top but very fun Kathryn Newton), the fact that he is an actual adult— the more desperately Griffin pursues him. Is Griffin’s behavior a little unhinged? Yes. But Blunck’s performance— at times forceful and angry, at other times jittery and unsure— along with Colia’s script ably capture that hit-by-a-freight-train feeling of young, first love, and how it feels like the world will end if you don’t hang on to it. Teague is good too, playing a sort of detached aimlessness that reads as stupidity to adults, while remaining clear why someone like Griffin would find it cool. There are other events unfolding in Griffin’s life at this time as well, things we are given just enough of a glimpse at to understand the situation: not only the feeling that Griffin’s friends are growing up and going in different directions in their lives without him, but the fact that his parents’ marriage is falling apart, lending a painful edge to the otherwise over-the-top silliness of his play, in which his pre-teen friends sip pretend martinis and shout about leaving their husbands and getting abortions.
There’s nothing surprisingly about Griffin in Summer’s filmmaking or storytelling, but it is the way the story is told— not only with the requisite humor and heart but with a real sense of a person changing, recognizing their errors and making an effort to correct them— that makes it a lovely, well-acted portrayal of an outcast carving out a space for themselves in their community, without sacrificing their own goals and sense of self.
Griffin in Summer had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival on June 6. Runtime: 90 minutes.
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