It’s the early 1980’s in small-town Texas and Ritchie Wheeler (Shiloh Fernandez) knows that things are changing. The skating rink he manages is going under, his friends are all on the verge of moving away and his parents are getting divorced. All of these events converge and force Ritchie to take new stock of his life and where he wants to be, but sometimes that’s hard to do.
I went into this expecting an Almost Famous vibe, but it didn’t really turn out that way. What I did find was a movie that I wanted to like, but ultimately found to fall flat in a lot of places.
The acting was all really well done. Shiloh Fernandez’s character, Ritchie, seems authentically from that time period. Ashley Greene and Heath Freeman are also really up to par for their roles as his friends.
However, there was a lot of meandering. At first, I couldn’t really tell what the message of the film was supposed to be. It felt sort of like a one-note, reminiscence-fest – which is fine, but it wasn’t really for me. There were some good scenes, but the tempo of the movie switched around too much for me to really sink my teeth into it.
JOE Rating: ★★
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