Right from the title, “Growing Up and Other Lies” is dominated by questions of aging, change, and rites of passage. “Growing Up,” the new film from writer/directors Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, the team behind 2008’s “Humboldt County,” is hardly the first film in recent memory to deal with these subjects, but it explores them with a sensitivity and authenticity that can only be imbued by personal experience.
The story centers on Jake (Josh Lawson) and his old friends, Rocks, Billy, and Gunderson (Adam Brody, Danny Jacobs, Wyatt Cenac). After living for years as a struggling artist, Jake is preparing to leave New York City to live in Ohio with his ailing father. To commemorate his last day, he gathers his friends to recreate a formative memory of theirs – walking the length of Manhattan Island in one day. As they walk south, they rediscover people and places from their past, and remembering who they were allows them to see who they’ve become.
The once-close friends have drifted apart, but immediately fall back into old habits. The film gives an excellent portrayal of a friend group’s conversation – the banter, the games, the old stories, the unresolved conflicts. The friends seem to speak their own language and the dialogue is consistently funny, especially when they have to translate for an outsider.
Jake initiated the walk as a way to provide that mythical, yet constantly invoked concept of closure. But re-experiencing the things he loves about NYC give him doubts about leaving, doubts that are actively encouraged by his friends who don’t want him to leave. Further complicating things is Jake’s ex-girlfriend Tabatha, who has just become single again.
There are many funny scenes on the trip south, which includes stops at the Cloisters, their first apartment (where a much debated “fire” destroyed Billy’s room), an art gallery, a children’s party in Central Park, and a disastrous dinner party, but the walk begins to seem like a flight from maturity instead of an embrace of it. Jake realizes that try as he might, he can’t manufacture a rite of passage that will make him feel ready to move on. An older guest at the dinner party points out, “Children, adults – we are all both.” The film shows that rites of passage are more of a useful construct than genuinely transformative experiences; they’re benchmarks for processes that happen gradually, without us really noticing.
The walk eventually goes off the rails somewhere around Soho, but the characters reunite in Queens as one of them undergoes a truly life changing event. They take a cab to Battery Park so they can reach their goal and watch the sunrise over the Statue of Liberty. They got where they were going, even if the route changed significantly. "Growing Up and Other Lies" shows that aging isn't something that's planned, but an inevitable process that takes us places we never expected.
