Kings of Summer next summer classic
I ’m not sure why The Kings of Summer is being marketed as the next Superbad. True, it’s about three boys at the end of a school year, but with that comparator it’s going to disappoint a lot of people for all the wrong reasons. Why not go out on a limb and call it the next summer classic?
Our three young protagonists live in fictional Tottenville, Ohio. Joe (Nick Robinson), Patrick (Gabriel Basso) and Biaggio (Moises Arias) are 15, an age when the desire to be an adult is pretty much fully formed, but all the actual trappings of maturity are off-limits.
When Joe stumbles into a deserted wooded area not far from home, he decides to abide there for the summer, living off the land and off the grid. Patrick takes some convincing but decides to join him. Oddball Biaggio — for some reason his name and demeanour suggests the crazy private from an old war movie — joins the party even though he wasn’t technically invited.
Fifteen is about the oldest you can be and still run away from home — leave it much longer and you’re just moving out. Joe wants to get away from his grouchy single dad (Nick Offerman, stealing every scene he can get his mitts on). Patrick’s parents (Megan Mullally, Marc Evan Jackson) seem to have about one brain between them. And Biaggio has his own, secret reasons.
They head out to their private glade with all the canned goods and cash they can carry from their parents, as well as materials scavenged from local construction sites. Here they revert to an earlier mode of existence, but not too early. This isn’t Lord of the Flies.
The bungalow-with-loft they improbably knock together looks like something out of the Swiss Family Robinson, and might be best viewed as a partial product of the boys’ imaginations. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle quickly turns into more shopper-gatherer, or bargainhunter. It’s pretty hard to kill any woodland creature with a dramatics-class sword, although Biaggio provides this existential non-sequitur: “A bear who doesn’t believe in anything will be easier to bring down.”
As the boys spout wispy beards and philosophy, their parents remain more annoyed than terrified by the disappearance of their kids, petty cash and groceries. Screenwriter Chris Galletta has said he drew on childhood memories of growing up on New York’s Staten Island, and although the action has been transplanted to Ohio, it’s not Into the Wild.
Of course, no 15-year-old’s summer fantasy would be complete without girls. Joe has a thing for classmate Kelly (Erin Moriarty), who obligingly breaks up with her boyfriend and drops by the cabin in the woods for a housewarming party, with a friend in tow. The moment when Joe realizes he still doesn’t have a shot with her is one of the film’s most heart-wrenching.
And this is the nub of the story. Director Jordan VogtRoberts has crafted a gentle tale about boys trying to figure out what it means to be men. Self-sufficiency is one qualifier, hence the building project and the film’s original title, Toy’s House. Getting out from under the parental thumb is another, although we sense that if Joe could just escape his dad’s mandated Monopoly family night, he’d be content.
Then there’s learning to balance the competing needs of love and friendship, of time alone versus time spent with others, and of self-interest and selflessness. It’s a chore for which summer’s long hours of daylight and fading responsibility seem to suggest to youth: “You can do this.”
Few of us have managed to nail down the answer, though we keep trying. Which is why The Kings of Summer will resonate with anyone who has ever passed through the gates of childhood. They may have closed behind us, but we can still look back through them and remember.