Theater Camp

Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman have made a mockumentary about a children’s drama camp, and they have made it from the inside. Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin and Lieberman wrote it together, and the four of them plainly went to places like this and have not recovered. A camera crew follows the staff through one summer’s rehearsals towards the original musical that ends every season. It is fond, it is funny in bursts, it is well cast from the adults down to the smallest child, and it is thin in the middle in a way that 93 minutes ought not to allow.

Platt and Gordon play Amos and Rebecca-Diane, the drama teachers who write the show. Platt plays Amos as a man who has never once wondered whether he is too much, and the performance is braver than it looks, because the joke is on him and he does not soften it. Gordon gives Rebecca-Diane a floaty vagueness that is hiding something the film gets to later. Galvin’s Glenn, the stage manager who does everything and is thanked for none of it, is the most likeable person on screen and gets the least to do until the end. Ayo Edebiri’s Janet teaches stage combat by asking the children what they think it is. Edebiri does almost nothing and gets the biggest laughs.

Nate Hurtsellers shoots it the way these things are shot: handheld, with zooms that arrive a beat late, catching people who thought the camera had moved on. The cabins, the hand-lettered signs and the cluttered costume shed that Jordan Janota and Charlotte Royer have put together look as if they have stood for decades without a repair. Michelle J. Li dresses the staff as people who buy their clothes from the same shops as their students. Jon Philpot cuts quickly between interviews and rehearsals, and when the story needs to jump he uses a title card, which is the mockumentary’s way of admitting it did not shoot the scene. There are a lot of title cards.

We laughed, properly, at a rehearsal in which Amos asks a girl of about ten to reach for the worst thing that has ever happened to her, and she does, and he is pleased. Then we felt a little ashamed, because the film is laughing at the adult and we had been laughing at the child. That double reaction is the film’s best trick, and it plays it several times. The campers are the sanest people in the place, and the young cast, Bailee Bonick and Kyndra Sanchez among them, play everything dead straight, which is why it works.

The trouble is what happens between the jokes. Amy Sedaris, as Joan, is written out before she has said much, and the film misses her. Jimmy Tatro’s Troy is a good running gag, a man who says he wants to circle back in a room full of eleven-year-olds, but he is a gag rather than a person and he has to carry the plot. Patti Harrison’s Caroline is in the same scene every time she appears. Nathan Lee Graham and Owen Thiele, as Clive and Gigi, are given one joke apiece and asked to repeat it. The middle third is rehearsal montages, and we noticed the time, which at this length we should not have.

Then the show arrives and the film gets much better. Mark Sonnenblick and James McAlister have written real songs for it, funny in the lyrics and properly built underneath, and the staging uses the camp’s own means: paint, cardboard, a follow spot and children who mean it. We will not describe what happens during the performance. It is the only stretch in which the film’s affection and its jokes are working at the same moment, and it moved us more than we expected.

Set beside Waiting for Guffman, which everyone will mention, this is gentler and less exact. Christopher Guest’s people were fools and he said so. Gordon and Lieberman’s people are fools and they love them, and the love keeps blunting the knife. The film is at its funniest in the scenes where it forgets to be kind.

If you were a theatre child, or are raising one, this is your evening and you will laugh more than we did. If you were not, be patient through the montages. The songs are worth the wait.