Full Grown Men

Plot

Alby Cutrera is a pathologically nostalgic guy who, at 35 years of age with a wife and young son, really just wishes he could ride his Schwinn 5 speed around all day on a Cherry Slurpee high.

His wife Suzanne and son Josh love him because he's funny and creative but for Suzanne it’s getting old and there’s rent to pay. Finally losing patience with Alby, Suzanne kicks him out of the house with the unequivocal instruction: "Don't come back 'til you grow up!"

Alby's having none of that and does what any hopeless case of arrested-development would do – he goes back to Mom's house. There, after having his fill of eating Fruit Loops and watching cartoons on TV, he decides to look up his old best friend from childhood, Elias Guber.

Alby is thrilled to get back with his old pal and relive old times, but there’s a problem – Elias remembers a much less rosy version of their childhood – one in which he was Alby’s performing monkey. But as always, Elias can't resist Alby's entreaties to take him along on a trip to Diggityland, a theme park up in central Florida that was their favorite place as kids. Elias is going there to get an award for his work as a special-ed teacher, a decidedly grown-up occupation, while Alby needs a ride up the coast to sell his precious action figures to a collectibles broker – a move he thinks will reinstate him in the good graces of his family and signal his transition into adulthood.

Along the way the two friends meet a series of similarly damaged romantics: a hitchhiking disgruntled former employee of Diggityland who has a "little matter to settle with the management"; Trina, a horny bartender who attends "Clownin' School" in hopes of earning her "Clownin' Degree" and joining the Circus; and a delusional fading beauty who lives in an Airstream trailer and obsesses over her past glory as the most beautiful and popular Weeki Wachee mermaid. Each pokes a new hole in Alby’s fantasy bubble of being a kid forever.

Ultimately it’s one of Elias’s students, a developmentally disabled boy named Rollie, a boy literally denied by fate the chance to ever become an adult, who teaches Alby the value of seeing beyond himself and taking responsibility for his actions.

Festival screenings