The Kings of Summer

High school student Joe (Nick Robinson) lives with his father (Nick Offerman), a stern man sitting on a volcano of anger. Joe's mother has died. He has an older sister (played by "Mad Men"'s Alison Brie), but she is engaged and out of the house. The tension between father and son is oppressive, and the rules feel arbitrary and unfair to Joe. During one night when the family gathers to play Monopoly, like they used to do when Mom was alive, the tension explodes. Joe didn't want to play anyway, he wanted to go to a party with his friends. After a fight with his dad, Joe ends up calling the police, claiming physical abuse. It's a radical move, dark and evocative of a deep psychological schism. There's a furious and smart movie inside "The Kings of Summer," a first feature by director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, a film about three teenage boys who take to the woods to build a house from scratch and live outside not only parental supervision but community norms and expectations. Unfortunately, despite some beautiful sequences and solid acting, the script by first-timer Chris Galletta pulls its punches, over-explains the emotional meaning of its moments, and tries to lighten the mood in sometimes awkward sit-com-style ways, betraying the movie's more honest spirit. "The Kings of Summer" flirts with profundity, seeming to yearn for it and fear the honest expression of it at the same time. There is much here to admire, but the overall impression is of a film that does not have the courage of its convictions.
Joe and his buddy Patrick (played by the open-faced and extremely talented Gabriel Basso) have been friends since childhood. Joe has issues with his father, and Patrick is heckled and cooed over by his intrusive well-meaning parents (played, hilariously, by Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson). Nothing seems bad enough here to warrant anyone running away, but "The Kings of Summer," to its credit, is going after a deeper more existential truth, common to most coming-of-age