‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ Review: Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney Can Only Do So Much to Elevate This Thinly Sketched Dramedy

Lester Smart (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is the sort of kid who cannot help but be exactly who he is. He daydreams conversations with theater legends like Noël Coward (Mark Caven) and Tallulah Bankhead (Laura Benanti) and recites Hair lyrics at would-be bullies; he dons ascots and berets in a milieu where faded Motley Crüe tees are the norm. If these are challenging qualities for a 14-year-old boy in late-’80s suburbia, they’re also bound to serve him well once he’s old enough to try his luck on Broadway.

Everything’s Going to Be Great, the movie he’s in, could have used a little more of Les’ irrepressibility. Instead, the new film by Jon S. Baird (Tetris) feels frustratingly non-committal, a mish-mash of wavering tones, disjointed story beats and themes explored only glancingly. It’s not entirely a bad time, as things involving Allison Janney and Bryan Cranston tend not to be. But it’s not exactly a satisfying one, either.

In a mildly interesting subversion of the usual Kurt Hummel-esque backstory, Les’ interests only reaffirm his bond with his parents, wannabe Broadway producer Buddy (Cranston) and pragmatic bookkeeper Macy (Janney). Their support does not extend as far as casting him in their regional theater productions — he has to audition for them every time, and they generally cast him in roles so small he’s “forced” to run on stage during scenes that aren’t his to get his fill of the spotlight. But when Les and Buddy are practicing the bagpipe before school, or singing along to showtunes in the car, it’s no mystery where he caught the theater bug. Among this crowd, it’s jock older brother Derrick (Jack Champion) who’s the misfit.

But life in the Smart household isn’t all sunshine and roses, even if Buddy is resolute that “happiness is inevitable” and his big break is just around the corner. His latest gamble, a seasonal producing job with the potential for longer-term employment, sends the family relocating from Ohio to New Jersey and then eventually to a Kansas farm owned by Macy’s semi-estranged grump of a brother, Walter (Chris Cooper).

Everything’s Going to Be Great is good for some mild chuckles, mostly coming from Cranston in the first half. Never an actor afraid to go big, he plays Buddy as a charmer who’s always on — always dreaming, always scheming, always doing the most to light up a room. But he modulates Buddy’s grandiosity with an easy affection toward his family and occasional hints of frustration. His fights with Macy, over money troubles and her perceived lack of faith in him, touch on the downside of creative ambition. “Dreams can destroy you,” she warns Les late in the movie, and by that point we’ve seen enough heartbreak to recognize she has a point.

For her part, Janney plays Macy with lots of warmth but also a gnawing sense of disappointment. “It’s hard being the plus one in your own life sometimes,” she confides to an actor friend (Simon Rex). Years of having to be the practical one so Buddy could be the fun one have left her feeling invisible, alienated from her own wants and needs. She increasingly turns to God for solace, to the discomfort of her pointedly nonconformist husband.

But Everything’s Going to Be Great is really about Les’ coming-of-age. In its second half, the film shifts from a lightly twee comedy about a quirky boy and his even quirkier family to become an earnest drama about how Les navigates the long shadow cast by the imperfect father he adores, and the ways he’s shaped by the unglamorous environments he’s raised in.

Or, at least, that’s what it means to do in theory. In practice, the screenplay by Steven Rogers (I, Tonya) doesn’t develop any of these strands fully enough to follow them anywhere interesting.

Ainsworth does what he can to bring some soul to his character, but it seems telling that he tends to be most convincing and most affecting in the moments when Les is quietest, as when he finds himself verklempt by the loveliness of a church choir. While Rogers deserves credit for not sanding down too many of Les’ sharp edges (he can be a little shit, and the movie at least somewhat knows it), he never plumbs his protagonist’s psyche thoroughly enough to make him more than the sum of his affectations.

Macy and Buddy fare a little better, mostly because Janney and Cranston’s lived-in performances help make them feel like real people. But their arcs are so simplistic as to feel underbaked; their crises barely get a chance to get going before they’re suddenly over.

At least with Derrick, the shallowness seems intentional, if ungenerous. Though the film isn’t told entirely from Les’ point of view — each of the Smarts gets their moments alone — it shares its hero’s disinterest in the notion that Derrick might have any interiority worth exploring. To the end, he’s an oaf who cares only about making the football team and losing his virginity.

Everything’s Going to Be Great suggests that all of this is destined to become fodder, someday, for Les’ brilliant creative career. “Kansas was my real inspiration. Kansas turned me into a real artist,” an imaginary William Inge (David MacLean) reassures Wes. “You can be happy here.” (To which Les retorts: “Didn’t you kill yourself?”) But if it’s meant to play as a sort of fictional memoir, it feels less like the finished product than the haphazard first draft — overstuffed and underdeveloped, a bunch of hastily scrawled notes strung together in search of a point.