Everything is a mess. I don’t just mean now, though right now as I write this and right now as you read this, there’s some degree of messiness. I also don’t mean things are a mess in the political sense, even though they one hundred percent are. It’s more personal than that, and it always has been.

Family is a mess, and that’s where it starts. Mine certainly is. My son is a senior and is making some very distressing noises regarding a college education. My wife enthusiastically and joyfully pressured me into adopting two kittens. That is, considering we already have two cats and two dogs. Between the random outbreaks of both violence and pooping, it’s like a maximum security prison here, only much cuter.

Your family, just like mine, is a mess. It might be largely functional, or a Titanic-level disaster, or you may have made your own. Family is only ever an engine powered by chaos. That’s what happens when, genetically or otherwise, people are thrown together for years. The new indie comedy, All Happy Families, takes a look at a Chicago family and the mess they have that’s uniquely theirs.

It begins with Graham Landry (Josh Radnor), plumber Phil Love (Antoine McKay), and some extremely janky pipes. Phil tells Graham that the pipes under the duplex he lives in are a disaster. The sewer camera shows Graham assorted debris, quite grimy buildup and a dead rat. Replacing the pipes will be costly, time consuming, and, unfortunately, necessary. We get the sense that Graham can relate.

He’s depressed and overwhelmed by pretty much everything. Graham’s acting career is going nowhere, as is his writing career. The duplex he manages is owned by his brother Will (Rob Huebel), a successful actor on a beloved television show. Will has turned humblebragging into an art form, but at least Will is in Los Angeles as opposed to right in Graham’s face. That’s what Graham thinks until Will shows up, mysteriously not talking about why he’s there.

Graham’s not the only one with problems. His mother Sue (Becky Ann Baker) is retiring from a job at a real estate office. During the party, her now former boss Jerry (David Pasquesi) sexually harasses her. Sue keeps it all on the down-low, especially from her husband Roy (John Ashton), an old school type of guy with his own secret. He’s a gambler, and unfortunately, he’s not a good one.

Everything is not coming up roses for the Landry family. It’s closer to a huge field of cow manure. For Graham, there’s the barest glimmer of a bright spot. He’s in charge of renting out the other side of the duplex, and who should come to check the place out is Dana (Chandra Russell). She’s an old friend of Graham’s. He doesn’t carry a torch for her, it’s closer to a bonfire. She might feel the same way. Maybe something can go Graham’s way, assuming he can deal with the flood of family chaos.

In an age where risk averse studios and streamers desperately mine IP, I’m happy that a film like All Happy Families exists. Director Haroula Rose has made a charmingly low stakes film about a dysfunctional family that still manages to care about each other. Rose is a Chicago filmmaker, and she wisely shot the film on location. That decision creates a specificity in the film, even though there’s only one scene showing the iconic Windy City skyline. Instead, Rose is showing a slightly lower middle class neighborhood, one that feels a little ramshackle in the best way. She does excellent work managing the multiple plotlines and eventually intertwining them in a satisfying way. She also allows the scenes time to breathe. That gives us a sense of the characters and their relationships.

The screenplay by Rose and Coburn Goss is light on plot and heavy on characterization. It’s not “about” anything beyond this family banging into each other over a few weeks. But it’s about these people with shared blood and shared history who are trying to simply manage. It sounds heavy, I know, and the last thing we need right now is misery porn. Rose and Goss inject a smart sense of humor into the proceedings. The gags never feel like sitcom fodder. They come from a place that’s honest and bruised.

The cast understands the assignment, and they all calibrate their performances to feel lived-in. I liked Josh Radnor’s understated turn as Graham. He plays a guy who feels like all the good opportunities passed him by, and there’s nothing else to do but manage the duplex and get high occasionally. It’s a good contrast to Rob Huebel as Will. Huebel’s Will is outwardly a successful TV star, the kind of person who unironically puts #blessed in his social media posts. Behind the try-hard positivity is panic, and Huebel allows that to leak before it explodes out. The late John Ashton is fun as the crusty Roy, who can’t quite wrap his head around a world that focuses on identity, even though he’s been coasting on his macho identity for decades. Perhaps my favorite performance is from Becky Ann Baker. I liked very much that Sue is the family’s rock, and she reaches a point where she decides that…maybe she doesn’t want to be the rock any longer. Baker inverts the standard-issue Mom character by giving Sue a little vinegar to go along with her agency.

While everything is a mess, there’s a tendency for the mess to eventually get cleaned up. It takes skill and intelligence to portray a messy family with precision. That’s what Haroula Rose and her team have done. Not many movies are made anymore like All Happy Families. With a little luck, this gem of a film will change that.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.