'Actual People' Review: Promising Debut Film Turns Gen Z's Champagne Problems Into Cinema

Few questions scare 22-year-olds more than, "What are you going to do after you graduate?" Unfortunately for Riley (Kit Zauhar), that's all everyone seems to be asking.

The senior has a week left until her college experience ends, and she has a professor who wants to let her down, a roommate who wants her out, and a new love interest that just might ease the pain of her latest relationship. So it's not practical, to say the least, that she has to spend so much time deflecting questions about those postgraduate scholarships she forgot to apply for.

Actual People, Zauhar's directorial debut, exists in a liminal space within a larger liminal space. College is already an oasis that shields young people from reality (whether they know it or not), but the real people who make up the film are graduate students with one foot outside. Stripped of even the petty responsibilities that have defined their past four years, there is nothing left but to alternate between celebrating and worrying about the future.

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Riley finds plenty of time to do both, even though there are far more important things to deal with. Still reeling from the news that her longtime boyfriend has left her for a girl from her finance class, her attempt to dull the pain with meaningless sex goes nowhere in a hurry. To make matters worse, the man she chose for her mundane one-night stand happens to be her older roommate, who doesn't want to live with her anymore after things get weird. All this drama has kept her from thinking about the job, so she graduates with no job, no boyfriend or a roof over her head.

If she can graduate. Amidst all the excitement, Riley forgot to hand in an important paper, and the failure puts her at risk of having to retake the course during the summer. But rather than double down and focus on her grades, she turns her attention to Leo, a new boy who just might be the solution to her heartbreak. He's handsome, he's cool, and just like her, he's half-Asian. It all seems too good to be true, and Riley spends her last week as a college student chasing love while shirking her responsibilities on an odyssey that takes her from New York to her hometown of Philadelphia and back again. .

It's the kind of muted slice-of-life movie that only works because a delightfully complex character anchors it. Riley is charismatic, self-destructive, and smart in the silly way only a heartbroken college kid can be. Zauhar delivers an excellent performance, portraying someone who continues to shoot himself in the foot without resorting to the self-righteous downfalls that weigh down so many less "adult is hard" films. She is far from independent, but neither is she a child in an adult body. Just as the film's title suggests, we're looking at a real 22-year-old.

Not all scenes in Zauhar's episodic storyline are winning. But taken together, they paint a compelling picture of the anxiety and dysfunction that paralyzes children who don't know how elitist they are. Set in a world of cool New York parties, therapy sessions, and MFA apps, “Actual People” is a portrait of a unique strain of Gen Z champagne issues. Any 22-year-old who can say “I feel like everyone I know goes to college,” without a hint of irony, is, by definition, a few degrees away from the vast majority of people. But Zauhar's sensitive touch elicits empathy for these children, even if their pursuit of shiny objects keeps them from solving extremely solvable problems.

"Actual People" follows in the tradition of "Slacker", "Clerks" and "Stranger Than Paradise", all films about unambitious scoundrels who nevertheless suggested that their directors had big things ahead of them. But while those films managed to capture the mind-numbing stagnation of Gen X boredom (and the absurd things people would do to combat it), "Actual People" updates that formula for an age of overstimulation that makes basically impossible boredom. The handheld camera's whimsical work allows viewers to float through this world much the same way Riley and his friends drift aimlessly between stimuli. Zauhar characters are never short of things to do, but they are constantly paranoid that someone else is doing something better or cooler than them.

Fortunately for the real Zauhar, who has established herself as a daring talent on both sides of the camera despite being barely older than her protagonist, that's almost certainly not true.

To note...