‘Problemista’ and ‘Drugstore June’ Rewrite Comedy for Millennial Ennui

With so many stars like Adam Sandler, Melissa McCarthy, and Seth Rogen seemingly abdicating the world of big-screen comedy in favor of streaming deals, TV shows, and producing roles, suddenly there are vacancies in that world – and younger voices moving in to fill it, however modestly or belatedly. The new movies Problemista and Drugstore June are not dead-center mainstream, comedies by design, even if the A24 promotional machine assures that the former will eventually turn up in some multiplexes. But the voices behind them are as clear and crisp as any number of more immediately recognizable comic performers, and they’re speaking to millennial experiences in ways that more established comedians, even post-Gen X cohort of Judd Apatow-related pals, cannot.

Julio Torres, the writer, director, and star of Problemista, and Esther Povitsky, star and cowriter of Drugstore June, are close in age, both well into their thirties. (He was born in 1987, she in 1988.) But they both play a bit younger in their new movies, or seem to; pointedly, neither of their characters supply exact ages while floating in a kind of postgraduate, preprofessional netherworld. In Problemista, Alejandro (Torres) has moved to the U.S. from his native El Salvator (a biographical detail he shares with Torres) in order to apply for a program at the toy company Hasbro, which doesn’t allow for submissions outside the country. This leaves Alejandro working a dead-end job to support himself in the U.S. while waiting to hear about his application – and scrambling for a visa sponsor when he’s fired. June (Povitsky), meanwhile, has more of a white-privilege safety net: She lives at home with her family, her bedroom still as decorated and untidy as a teenager’s, and works the register at a local pharmacy, with only the vaguest plans to someday, maybe, possibly get her own place. (In the meantime, she’s dismissive when her parents suggest she might chip in on household expenses.)

Both character occupy their own little bubbles and depend heavily on their mothers in particular, though their individual backgrounds are drastically different. Alejandro describes a childhood with an artistic mom who nourished his sense of whimsical possibility, which explains why his suggestions for Hasbro include Cabbage Patch Kids that come with smartphones and attendant digitally enhanced interpersonal drama – something June seems to crave, as she streams daily for her “JuneSquad” and stalks her ex-boyfriend, on and offline. Throughout her self-involved routines, she leans on her mom for on-demand emotional support – and copious snacks, which she hordes despite her ongoing and incorrect conviction that she’s a health-conscious eater with a gluten allergy. June can’t even handle a fake diet; she’d be lost navigating the catch-22 purgatory that Alejandro finds himself in, as an immigrant who needs to make money to pay for his visa application, while not appearing to make that money illegally, and also securing gainful employment that will help his visa. When his bank charges him money for not having money in his account, he imagines himself in armor, confronting the service representative in a cave, just attempting to pry out an admission that this is unfair.

There’s conceptual boldness in refusing to treat this exclusively as fodder for millennial fragility – while also not denying that there is such a thing. Of course, the characters’ reactions to their environments vary. June withdraws into her teenage bedroom by choice, while Alejandro gives the impression of someone who would like to perform a similar retreat but has not been afforded the opportunity – he even has to sublet his meager bedroom in a shared apartment – and Torres nails the body and verbal languages of someone moving delicately through life as a means of self-preservation. What the two movies share is a sense of 21st century young people cocooning themselves in a state of removal from the world, either physically or mentally, through some combination of wistful imagination and the unforgiving harshness of outside circumstances. (In June’s maladjusted case, she wistfully imagines various diagnoses that would comprise some harsher circumstances for herself. At very least, she’s already diminutive.)

Going by their actual ages, Povitsky and Torres are right at the heart of the millennial generation, but their movies feel like they teeter on the cusp of the Gen Z culture that emerged a decade behind them. When June chastises someone for using “the m-word,” it’s unclear whether she considers it misclassification or just doesn’t want to hear it. The slight opacity of the moment only makes it funnier.

Problemista and Drugstore June both pull from their respective stars’ established routines. Torres has worked as an SNL writer, where he made multiple sketches where familiar-seeming toys hint at a melancholy or turbulent inner life; Povitsky’s film pulls some jokes and ideas (like her preferred substitute for the word “horny,” “hot and ready”) from her polished stand-up act. Sometimes vehicles constructed from these materials can feel calculated and unconvincing, an agency demo-reel disguised as a feature film. That’s not the case with either of these.

Problemista is the more ambitious of the two, with touches of deadpan surrealism that recall Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. It also harnesses the extraordinary resources of Tilda Swinton to play Alenjandro’s sort-of boss Elizabeth, who enlists him to help curate an art show for her dead husband, and is heedlessly unaccommodating at every turn. She’s a maddening woman, impatiently quick to shoot off into angry tangents, a source of great frustration to Alejandro, yet he does see something in her brashness – her immovability. Sometimes intransigence is the only sane response to a country with such stringently contradictory rules, and Problemista’s view of a generation ready to be squeezed out of happiness at any moment feels fully formed (if, granted, unmistakably and unavoidably the work of someone who has succeeded wildly in his chosen field).

Drugstore June doesn’t have such lofty aims; it’s from the director of Grandma’s Boy and assembles a bunch of stand-up comics and improv comedians to populate its small town weed stores, pool halls, and fast food joints. It’s eventually and loosely about June playing amateur detective to solve the robbery of her pharmacy, to clear the name of her laid-back boss (Bobby Lee). Mostly, this is an excuse for arrested-adolescence narrative, like something out of the Rogen or Sandler oeuvres, only with cartoony satire in place of any late-breaking moralizing. Povitsky and director/cowriter Nicholaus Goossen have such clarity about who June is that their movie takes on a kind of purity, even as it zigzags from cultural satire to insult comedy to townie noir. If Alejandro quietly mourns the peace he’s paradoxically lost by chasing a childhood dream, June refuses to go quietly into the Gen Z night, jealously guarding her immaturities like the treat she keeps in her “cupcake safe.”

It’s hard to know how well either Povitsky or Torres can translate these anxieties into more movies; their seeming aversions to easy formulas will make it hard to repeat those baby steps toward an imperfect but hard-won semblance of adulthood. (By the same token, these movies aren’t going to post Grown Ups numbers at the box office.) Even if these movies turn out to be one-offs, though, their visions are liberating. So many of the systems millennials were supposed to rely on break down; why shouldn’t comedy follow suit?

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.