Summertime Review: Too Cute By Half

There is no main character in "Summertime." No central figure or figures to rally around. It's just several smaller dramas laid end to end, over time overlapping in ways both fascinating and haphazard. At such a brisk runtime, the sheer breadth of individuals the audience is introduced to feels ambitious to a fault. Someone will just appear onscreen and deliver a charming poem to themselves, the viewer and whoever may be around within their little showcase of a vignette. Once their little scene concludes, they'll walk by someone else or a passerby doubling as an interstitial, then someone new enters the fray. Rinse. Repeat.

"Summertime" has the tenor of a screen musical. Within that format, characters will break into song at opportune intervals, bursting into melody and making their dramatic subtext into very loud, often catchy bits of text. But here, instead of songs, the characters perform seemingly extemporaneous expressions of their own inner turmoil. In the film's first third or so, these Def Poetry Jam monologues take inconsistent forms. They might be comedic screeds from a put-upon Yelper (Tyris Winter) clapping back at the rude server he receives in a gentrified brunch spot or a lesbian babysitter defiantly declaring her orientation for a bigoted bus passenger. But these easy layup explosions of righteous fury feel hollow, as they're often directed at paper-thin straw man antagonists who exist solely to be both loud and on the wrong side of history. 

It gets more troubling when the more experimental sequences begin to occur, like being asked to watch estranged lovers in a non-traditional kind of couples therapy that leads them to freestyle at each other, complete with bongoes as accompaniment. Or ongoing scenes with Anewbyss (Bryce Banks) and Rah (Austin Antoine), a pair of up and coming rappers making their way in the world despite the fact that their individual performances leave a lot to be desired.

Scenes like this call to mind Estrada's debut film "Blindspotting," but they remind us how that film's particular rhythm and vibe was born of its two leads writing together and having a unified vision for their respective characters. This is a movie working from a script cobbled together from nearly 30 disparate creative voices. If "Blindspotting" was a well-executed concept album, "Summertime" is a various artists compilation without the necessary A&R work to cultivate something resembling a sonic through-line. 

For every hit, there's an equal or exceeding amount of misses — and this being a movie and not a record, there's no way to skip all the duds. So when a subplot involving a jilted ex (Maia Mayor) stalking her former flame and what she perceives to be their new partner wastes precious screen time, the viewer is just stuck with her every time she pops back up. It's so unfortunate.

In the micro sense, some of the individual poems and performances are quite strong, but taken together, too many of the worst offenders are dripping with a front-facing sentimentality that borders on insufferable. It's clear that each of the artists asked to contribute to this group project had their own thematic axes to grind, so in concert, there is something interesting to be said about the branching cultural shifts, the travails of the gig economy and the strange ways our lives often intersect.

It's just that all those things are said in an often grating tone that feels like drinking wheatgrass and Diet Coke back to back.