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"As You Are"
U.S. Dramatic Competition
HH
Adolescent angst goes retro in "As You Are," a brooding drama of a teen love triangle in the age of Nirvana. It's 1994, and Jack (Owen Campbell) is your normal skateboarding, grunge-listening teen in an upstate New York town. Then his single mom (Mary Stuart Masterson) tells him he's going to meet Mark (Charlie Heaton), the son of Mom's current boyfriend, Tom (Scott Cohen). Jack and Mark it it off well, bonding over music and marijuana and their mutual friendship with their classmate, Sarah (Amanda Stenberg). Director/co-writer Miles Joris-Peyrafitte reveals much of this in flashbacks, as told by the characters in videotaped interrogations by a (mostly) unseen police detective (John Scurti). We know something's up in the Jack/Tom/Sarah circle, and we're informed early on that gunplay is in the mix. A key piece of information Joris-Peyrafitte withholds isn't that tough to guess, which is in keeping with a slow-paced drama that thinks it's deeper than it is.
— Sean P. Means
"As You Are" screens again at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival: Tuesday, 6 p.m., Sundance Mountain Resort Screening Room; Wednesday, 8:30 a.m., Prospector Square Theatre, Park City; Thursday, 12:15 p.m.; Eccles Theatre, Park City; Friday, 12:30 p.m., Redstone Cinema 1, Park City; Saturday, 3:15 p.m., Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City.