3 out of 5

Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

16 year old Craig is thinking about suicide. He knows his life ain’t all that bad, but he’s thinking about it anyway. This is a realistic, common circumstance, and good grounds for this style of indie movie, that bittersweet 90 minute affair that is cool enough to add in those little 4th-wall-breaking moments that the kids love but not quite cool enough to do anything new. But this is just fine, because the story chooses to tread this middleground as well. Craig, after pleading with a doctor, is checked into an in-patient mental ward for at least 5 days. He soons comes to regret his decision, locked up with people who seemingly have it much worse than he. What’s great about this movie is it’s sense of honesty: while the teens involved have that frustrating desire to feel that being “strange” (i.e. normal) is uncool (i.e. cool), and thus speak of depression and its symptoms in very surface terms, this would seem to be a realistic representation of privileged kids with problems. It balances this with Zach Galifianakis, who plays Bob, a divorced, homeless 30-something who can’t seem to get back on track with his life. Galifianakis plays his usual sardonic self but is put to excellent dramatic use here, showing the reality of living this way without a circle of friends and family to support you. It all wraps up nicely, and my biggest guff here is that you always have to have the hot depressed chick with scars who is “dangerous” and yup, she’s there, and she’s the love interest, but overall “it’s kind of a funny story” treads a respectable enough line to try and make a packaged movie out of a non-packagable problem, and also applying this light touch to remove the burden of “problem” from the equation and show the human side to things. A little too easy – very surface – but a good balance.