Daddy Longlegs

[Daddy Longlegs]

Directed by Josh & Benny Safdie

At IFC Center

Runtime: 98 min.

Writer-director brothers Josh and Benny Safdie have created an antic, melancholy-tinged ode to childhood in general—and their own in particular—with [Daddy Longlegs], one that comes with all of the trappings of a 1970s film. From the accessories (floppy hats) to the hairstyles (huge sideburns), every character in the movie looks as if they’ve just stepped out of a New York City-based movie from 1977. Only the posters on the streets give any clue that the film is actually set in today’s NYC.

The film skitters from one vignette to another, as father Lenny (Ronald Bronstein) mismanages his two children (real life brothers Sage and Frey Ranaldo) for their two-week stay with him in his small apartment. Running back and forth from his job as a film projectionist to his children, Lenny has the gift of turning even the smallest excursion into an adventure, one that his sons eagerly eat up. They indulge him in his reliving of his childhood, even as he leaves them for the night to have a one-night stand with a woman in a bar, then invites himself and his kids along with her and her boyfriend on their trip Upstate.

Lenny is precisely the kind of charming, thoughtless egoist who would do something like that, then crank up his travel mixtape on the drive while every one else is fast asleep. And Daddy Longlegs is precisely the kind of fantasy where his music doesn’t wake anyone up. But eventually, Lenny stops being deeply annoying and turns into a flawed-but-good man. When he’s mugged on the street on his way to pick up his sons, holding a bag of groceries with three ice cream cones splayed between his fingers, he resolutely refuses to think about it afterward. His cavalier attitude toward being held up at gunpoint seems at first just another example of how unseriously he takes life, but gradually his reluctance to face the negative seems more indicative of his threadbare sunny outlook on life. His apartment is cramped, and he often can’t handle his own children. But he loves the concept of being a father and imparting his own boisterousness to his sons.

The Safdie brothers elicit remarkable, low-key performances from Bronstein and the Renaldos, all of them fitting into the dreamy landscape of the Safdies’ vision with surprising ease. The Safdies show less ability in terms of story construction, relying too heavily on the audiences’ knowledge of ’70s film tropes and allowing their film too often to feel jumbled and half-formed. But the final moment of Daddy Longlegs, set on the Roosevelt Island tram, actually captures the shattering of childhood illusions, as Lenny’s last-ditch effort to improve his lot in life goes horribly, hilariously wrong. Having come to terms with their own childhoods, the Safdie brothers are now offering up their wisdom about goofiness and painfulness of childhood—and the angst of being a father of children.