Simon Cox Blog: Don't Think Twice

Wednesday, 20 July 2016

Don't Think Twice

What happens when your friends get famous, and you don't?

It's intoxicating: you're young and creative and ambitious and thirsty. You arrive in the big city with a suitcase full of dreams. Eventually you meet people like you, misfits toys looking for an island, and you build a life together. For the first time, you and your “hobbies” are a serious matter. Maybe these dreams could be your life. Maybe these people could be your family. You're all going to hit it big together. So you spend your evenings draped across couches and living room floors together, dreaming, eating pizza, creating stuff. And eventually people start to pay attention.

There are movies about this—mostly musician biopics. But what happens next?

Don't Think Twice has a gentle heart that makes its uncomfortably familiar story go down smooth. Written TK and directed by the great Mike Birbiglia (Sleepwalk With Me), it's a deceptively lightweight comedy about a group of friends (Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Kate Micucci, Tami Sagher, and Birbiglia) who form an improv troupe they call “The Commune.” They live a commune, too. No longer carefree twentysomethings, they still spend their time together, eating together, partying together, dreaming together. Every week their improv show is moderately successful—enough that a scout for a Saturday Night Live-like variety show, the holy grail for stand-up comics, shows up one night, and several of them are invited to audition. But in life and in movies, the course of competition between ambitious friends never did run smooth. One member of the group actually gets cast in the show, and the Commune's equilibrium is thrown off.

Don't Think Twice is a clever comedy, buoyed along by some of the best ...