The heartland offers painful life lessons in this adaptation of David Sedaris’s autobiographical essay from his 1997 bestseller Naked. Jonathan Groff (Glee) plays an east-coast naif just out of Yale grad school (but perhaps not fully out of the closet) and searching for a latter-day version of mythic arcadia. He thinks he’s found it when he lands a job picking apples in Oregon, but soon discovers that the locals are rustic boors, suspicious or hostile when not downright terrifying; for example, there’s a sexually predatory coworker (Corey Stoll of Midnight in Paris) and a maimed war vet turned soldier for Christ (Denis O’Hare). Writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez (Easier With Practice) blends pointed satire with gallows humor, much like Sedaris himself.
C.O.G.
R • 1 hour 29 min