Movie Review: ‘All Summers End’

Review by Jacquelin Hipes

Adolescence is filled with mistakes, although for most of us those stumbles are allowed to fade quietly with time. But the reckless hubris of youth sometimes invites disaster, as one teenager learns in All Summers End. Conrad (Tye Sheridan) and his two best friends Tim (Ryan Lee) and Hunter (Austin Abrams) indulge the expected summer pastimes of teenage boys. They spend most of their days riding their bikes around town avoiding the attention of their parents, and at night they make (mostly) harmless mischief toilet papering houses or eating ice cream on top of the local baseball stadium’s dugout. Conrad has started drifting away from the other two boys, though, as his crush on Grace (Kaitlyn Dever) grows. He spends time with her in the park and ditches plans to eat dinner with her family, where her older brother Eric (Beau Mirchoff) first gives him a hard time, then his cautious approval.

In a bid to regain Conrad’s attention, Hunter suggests they “borrow” his grandfather’s truck one night and drive around stealing lawn ornaments from their neighbors’ yards. What starts as a tense expedition soon takes on a rollicking tone, each boy taking turns snatching garden gnomes and flamingos from dark patches of grass. Pressing his advantage, Hunter dares Conrad to steal something from Grace’s yard. He reluctantly agrees, only to get caught in the act by Eric when Hunter blows the horn. When Eric angrily chases them out into the country an accident leaves him dead alongside the road, forever altering the lives of Grace, her family, and the three boys.

The enticing questions of guilt, responsibility, and where one draws the line between childhood and adulthood are largely squandered in a cliché-riddled script. Conrad is the only character graced with any measure of depth, torn between basic kindness and self-preservation in the accident’s fallout. We’re told his mother (Paula Malcomson) became clingy after Conrad’s father left, justifying how often he sneaks out, but we never see her as anything more excessive than a concerned parent. Both Tim and Hunter are generically snotty towards Grace, who acts haughty in turn. There’s no discernable reason for their attitudes other than an unspoken assumption that most teenage relationships come to pass in a similar fashion. It’s all quite paper-thin, in disappointing contrast to the promising subjects on hand.

A voice-over by an older Conrad (Pablo Schreiber) holds the viewer’s hand and functions as an emotional shortcut in case you ever doubt how Grave and Important the events of that summer are. Sheridan and Dever do the best they can, drawing out the awkward intimacy of adolescence in the few quiet moments they share. The pair isn’t enough to salvage what’s ultimately a melodrama without blood or gristle to support it, though. Character-driven stories require complex individuals at their center and unfortunately All Summers End fails to provide more than spiritless approximations.

IN THEATERS AND AVAILABLE ON VOD AND DIGITAL HD: June 1.