It increasingly feels like a cosmic joke in “Their Town” that Abby (Ora Duplass) and Matt (Chosen Jacobs) are brought together by a plan to rehearse, seemingly having no time at all to prepare for much of anything in their lives so far. They aren’t about to get much more now when Matt is thrust into a leading role in his high school play opposite Abby with a week before the show is supposed to go on and their drama teacher’s hasty plan to fill the role once occupied by Abby’s boyfriend Tyler (William Atticus Parker) by asking them to run lines for a few hours before classes start seems like the path to embarrassment, though Matt can already get a taste of that when Abby approaches him after school to get a head start. You can actually feel the cool Bangor, Maine breeze when she asks if he has plans for the evening in Katie Aselton’s finest film to date when there’s a reason Matt wanted a behind-the-scenes role in the production while Abby was going to be front-and-center on stage, yet neither is either quite as confident or fragile as they appear, making the need to reach out to one another even more pressing than they could know.
An elevator pitch for the Mark Duplass-penned drama might read like “Before Sunrise” amongst a pair of teens, which would seem rather silly if the world didn’t seem to move as fast as it does now and the fact that Abby and Matt have both experienced more than their age would suggest gives way to a drama that feels unique to the moment. In Matt’s case, his father (Daveed Diggs) spends much of his time abroad in China and beams in via Zoom, making him a latchkey kid, albeit one with a fancy colonial home to tend to, while Abby wishes she could spend less time with her mother (Kim Shaw), who appears far more comfortable with her daughter’s status as a queen bee than she does, assuming popularity equals contentment and conspicuously enjoys having Tyler around the house. A trip to his place leads to more procrastination than any time practicing the play they should rehearsing, but gradually both discover they already inhabited roles at school when neither feel like they can entirely be themselves in public with things in their background that are too difficult to explain and Abby ends up stumbling onto a yearbook from Hilltop Pre-K where it turns out the two were once thick as thieves to judge by old pictures and drawings, making it easier to rekindle an old spark than having to start from scratch.
The film is a shameless starring vehicle for Mark Duplass and Aselton’s daughter Ora — forgivably so, when she proves herself a natural who couldn’t ask for a more ideal part to show off her range when Abby has the disarming charm to make Matt’s assumption that she’s had it easy all her life understandable but also some level of sadness behind her eyes that the actress readily can bring to the surface. However, it also proves to be an excellent showcase for Aselton’s strengths as a filmmaker, often having to employ some high-concept plot to explore intimacy or regaining trust after it’s shaken and the film feels a little looser without those demands being quite as overt. The momentum from Abby and Matt warming up to one another is more than enough to keep the narrative compelling and the filmmaker’s ability to draw out unforced performances of considerable depth really shines.
The conversation between Abby and Matt unfolds in long, absorbing takes with Aselton teaming with cinematographer Sarah Whelden, who injected kineticism into Aselton’s previous drama “Magic Hour” where restlessness within a marriage was expressed with an energetic back-and-forth, and “Their Town” builds to a scene on a swing set much more subdued than anything in their last film together yet fuses movement and the talk at hand with all its requisite highs and lows in a tremendously powerful way, not only being able to meet each other at the same level, but warmly inviting audiences to do so as well.
“Their Town” does not yet have U.S. distribution.