Review: I Used To Go Here

Image courtesy of Gravitas Ventures. 

It's been said that you can't go home - and while that's not technically true, it's arguable that you can't go back to the home you once knew. There have been plenty of stories told - both in prose and onscreen - in which people return to the place in which they once resided, only to find they don't recognize it anymore.

In Kris Rey's mostly charming low budget comedy "I Used to Go Here," Kate (Gillian Jacobs), a novelist whose first work has been published to little fanfare, finds that things look mostly the same when she returns to the small Illinois college town where she once attended school. But rather than being the confident young woman she once was in college, she has now become weighted down by neuroses.

One can't really blame her. The sales of her first novel - a romance, of sorts that follows a series of much better received personal essays she wrote - are lackluster, the only review she has read is unkind and her book tour has been canceled by her publisher. On top of that, she has broken up with her fiance, and notices on Facebook that he's seemingly dating again. Early in the film, she attends a baby shower for three different friends - all sporting baby bumps - and all she has to display is her mostly ignored debut novel.

She travels to her old college town at the bequest of an old professor, David (Jemaine Clement), who was her inspiration for getting into writing. He has invited Kate to speak to a bunch of his students at the college and read passages from her book. Upon arriving, she checks into a bed-and-breakfast run by a surly woman and realizes the B&B is across the street from the former house where she lived as a student and spent some of her formative years.

David is excited to see her, but Kate is quick to spot that her old professor - who is seemingly unhappily married - eyes his female students, especially one named April (Hannah Marks), who gives an evocative reading in class. David tells Kate he thinks she should consider a teaching gig he's trying to fill at the university, and she appears to consider the offer.

Meanwhile, Kate wanders over to the house where she lived while in college and meets its new denizens - a group of young men who could be considered to make up a somewhat dorky frat. She gets invited to a party at the house that night, and finds herself getting embroiled in the group's intrigues - which include one student's romantic involvement with April, and his belief that she's cheating on him. Wanna guess with whom she's sneaking around?

All the while, the theme that you can't quite go home again remain prominent - Kate realizes David isn't so much a booster of creativity than he is a cad, while another old male friend she runs into invites her for coffee, only to end up in an awkward makeout session involving the friend and another woman he's invited. 

The film's centerpiece is a sequence during which Kate gets roped into tagging along with the frat house guys to another house where they believe April is having a late night booty call. It's the sort of awkward sequence you might expect in a film about a person in their mid-30s realizing they haven't grown up as much as they'd have liked and are unsure where their path next leads. It's a pretty funny scene, even if it goes exactly where you'd expect.

"I Used to Go Here" is often warm and funny, which is due to the casting. Jacobs does a fine job as Kate, a hot mess in search of a purpose, and the group of students all have their distinct personalities - especially Brandon Daley as Tall Brandon, a lanky giant whose well-meaning attitude leads him to get involved one of the film's kookier subplots.

The film doesn't say anything we don't already know about its aforementioned theme, but it's a good-hearted story about finding the courage to rise up again after failure and starting anew by simply being yourself. At a brisk 85 minutes, it's also an enjoyably breezy little comedy about how nostalgia can be a dangerous thing when trying to inhabit a world you've since passed by. It's worth a watch.