Indie dramedy ‘Joshy’ transcends expectations

At first, Joshy — the umpteenth reiteration of a vaguely Big Chill scenario — seems so indie it hurts.

Director Jeff Baena is best known as the writer of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees and the cast list reads like a Lollapalooza of Sundance actors: Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley), Adam Pally (The Mindy Project), Alex Ross Parry (Tiny Furniture, 7 Chinese Brothers), Joe Swanberg (director of Drinking Buddies and Digging for Fire), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation, Dirty Grandpa), Jenny Slate (Parks and Recreation), Nick Kroll (Parks and Recreation and his own Kroll Show), and Alison Brie (Community, Sleeping With Other People, Kings of Summer).

But once you dig beneath its familiar surface and get beyond the “old friends” from every independent film ever, Joshy is actually an engagingly perceptive and often darkly funny glimpse at wrestling with issues of adulthood after a life of seemingly endless adolescence.

Middleditch is the title character, an L.A. 30-something who’s about to get married to Rachel (Brie) but then her suicide abruptly changes his life plans. His friends — Ari (Pally), Adam (a wonderfully sad-sack Ross Parry), Eric (Kroll) and his loud buddy, Greg (Brett Gelman) — decide that the bachelor party/boys’ weekend they had planned should still go forward to get his mind off things.

That’s how they all end up in a rented pad in Ojai, doing dope, drinking too much and talking about everything from backpacker hip-hop to board games and time-travel theories. It’s all fun and games until no-nonsense friend Aaron (Swanberg) shows up with his wife and 4-year-old son, Rachel’s angry parents (Paul Reiser, Lisa Edelstein) arrive in an accusatory mood, a too-talkative prostitute (a funny Lauren Weedman, Looking) is brought in, and Josh realizes the enormity of losing someone he loves.

It makes for an affecting story, punctuated by some appealingly dark humor. When Jodi (Slate), a woman they meet at a nearby bar suggests she has a friend who might want to meet Adam, he responds, “Does she like desperate, broken men with nothing to offer?”

Yes, this Big Chill heats up pretty quickly.

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This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 12:24 PM with the headline "Indie dramedy ‘Joshy’ transcends expectations."