Summer Night
**Seen as part of the 2019 Atlanta Film Festival. I had some interactions with some of the cast and director Joseph Cross that I will share later.**
It takes a lot for me to really become engaged by a coming-of-age film nowadays. Joseph Cross’s “Summer Night” checks an awful lot of those boxes in the same way a “Dazed and Confused” or “American Graffiti” does as it looks at lives on the brink of change. The screenplay by Jordan Jolliff (with revisions by Cross) feels like it came out of memories of a moment in time where he’s remembering specific friends, specific times they shared, over the course of an evening one summer. It’s a film about young adults in the best ways, even when it highlights the worst behavior.
Filmed in Georgia, the small town is largely nondescript, but it feels like a lot of small towns you might live in or visit in America; I definitely felt like it could have taken place in my original hometown of Ravenna, Ohio, as my friends before I moved to Georgia grew up. The cast of characters begins to take shape, with Jameson (Ellar Coltrane) and Seth (Ian Nelson) spend a lazy summer day in the woods, away from everyone. When they get back into town, Seth finds his phone blowing up with texts from Mel (Analeigh Tipton), his girlfriend, whom is with Lexi (Lana Condor) and Vanessa (Melina Vidler) after realizing she is pregnant. Lexi, meanwhile, has her own issues with her boyfriend, Rabbit (Bill Milner), when she tells him she slept with another man at her sister’s wedding. Taylor (Callan McAuliffe) is a musician back in town for a big gig at the local watering hole with a few other bands, but he is jumped riding his bike, and finds Dana (Ella Hunt), who offers to tend to his wounds. All leads to The Alamo, the bands performing, and personal entanglements coming to a head.
One of the things that struck me so much about the way Cross directs this was how well he shot the musical sequences in the bar. There’s only so many ways you can shoot musical sequences in a film like this, but I felt like Cross, who gets some great bands together thanks to his music supervisor, finds a way to film the numbers in a way that gets to the emotions of the characters playing the music, as well as the ones listening to it. There’s a lot of heart and feeling in this movie, as well as sometimes being very funny, and that’s one of the best things Cross does with this script. And he gets standout work from all of the actors involved, which includes Justin Chatwin as Andy, a bartender who has an interesting way of looking at life and Victoria Justice as Harmony, Jameson’s date on this evening. It’s a very predictable first film in a lot of ways, but it’s one that Cross can be very proud of with how much entertainment he provides his audience.
