Kevin Smith revisits his ’80s youth in ‘The 4:30 Movie’

RALPH BAVARO

Siena Agudong and Austin Zajur co-star in Kevin Smith’s “The 4:30 Movie.”

You can’t go home again, but sometimes you have to try.

Kevin Smith left his beloved New Jersey for Hollywood years ago but — creatively, at least — it seemed like he also left some things behind. His previously good-natured, hang-out movies began to veer into absurdist horror — “Red State,” “Tusk,” “Yoga Hosers.” Their distribution got increasingly spotty, dependent on in-person promotions. One film, “KillRoy Was Here,” was released as “5555 exclusive non-fungible tokens” and no, I still have no idea what that means.

Lately, though, Smith seems to have felt a pull back to his roots.

In 2022, he bought Atlantic Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands, the neighborhood theatre of his youth, and renamed it SModcastle Cinemas. He also made “Clerks III,” returning to the Quick Stop characters who had first made his career back in 1994. Yet this sequel was no simple cash-in. Its sometimes sad, often surreal story took challenging turns. Its protagonists seemed marked by a middle-aged man’s sense of mortality, loss and regret.

Clearly, Smith — who had a near-fatal heart attack in 2018, and a self-described mental health crisis in 2023 — was going through some things.

His latest film, “The 4:30 Movie” — opening Sept. 11 at SModcastle Cinemas and in New York — suggests that he has happily come out the other side. Although it is still an R-rated comedy (Smith has to get in his jerk-off jokes and scatological shtick), it is perhaps his kindest picture since “Jersey Girl” — a story about friendships, crushes, hometowns. It’s not just a movie about teens set in 1986. It feels like a movie about teens that was made in 1986.

RALPH BAVARO

From left, Reed Northrup, Austin Zajur and Nicholas Cirillo in “The 4:30 Movie.”

The plot is wafer thin: Brian, an Atlantic Highlands teenager, has finally gotten up the courage to ask his dream girl, Melody, to join him and his friends at the movies. Complicating things is that the comedy they want to see is rated R, and they are all under 17. So the plan is that Brian and his buds will get there first and buy tickets to a PG-13 movie; later they will all sneak into the other movie together.

Of course, nothing goes quite as planned.

Smith has always had the sensibilities — for better, and worse — of a smartass teenager. But as his characters have aged, some of their snark and crudity began to lose their appeal. What plays like sarcasm or rebellion in a 20-year-old can feel like defeatism and self-destructiveness in a 50-year-old. It’s an attitude shift Smith seemed to be grappling with in “Clerks III”: Maybe this isn’t quite so funny anymore.

But giving that teenage wasteland attitude to actual teenage characters brightens everything. It’s OK that they get into stupid fights and squabble with low-level authority figures, laugh too loud at their own stupid in-jokes and spend a perfectly lovely summer day watching one schlocky movie after another. That’s what teenagers do. And what, one day, they will fondly remember having done, in the suddenly long-ago past.

And Smith is old enough to appreciate that now.

Unfortunately, the writing — always his strong point — isn’t always strong enough here to bring that out. The movie isn’t just set in the past, but way too many jokes depend on someone not knowing the future (“Who’s going to go see a Batman movie?”) It’s a lazy way to suck up to the audience, congratulating us on our own superiority. And the brief, guest star appearances of actors from previous Smith movies — Justin Long, Rosario Dawson — is the cheapest kind of View Askew fan service.

Also superfluous are the fake trailers that unspool onscreen while our characters are waiting for Melody to show up at the theater. The faux coming attractions that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez included in their “Grindhouse” double feature were wittily scripted and well shot; a few ended up inspiring actual movies. But the joke was that we knew these were so-bad-they’re-good movies that someone was working hard to make look unironically great; here, the promos are just as inexpertly made as the pictures they’re promoting.

RALPH BAVARO

Ken Jeong in “The 4:30 Movie.”

Still, Smith’s cast — apart from the usual hangers-on and relatives — elevates the material. Although his pals are either forgettable or overdrawn, Austin Zajur, who plays Brian, eventually grows on you and Siena Agudong, who plays his crush, is appealing right from the start. And while neither Rachel Dratch nor Ken Jeong have ever been hailed for the subtlety of their performances, their willingness to yell, mug or do whatever it takes to get a laugh ends up being a valuable contribution.

And the director, time-travelling back to his adolescence — by the end, it’s clear we’ve really been watching the Kevin Smith Origin Story — gets the ’80s touches just right. The high school girls with the criminally teased hair. The geeky fanboys poring over Starlog magazine. The thumping radio hits you can’t escape, until they suddenly disappear to make room for the next summer smash (and, tell me, when was the last time you thought about Nu Shooz and “I Can’t Wait”?)

Frankly, “The 4:30 Movie” — whose title slyly references a local TV show that educated a generation of movie nerds – isn’t a huge leap forward for Smith. Nor, I imagine, should anyone expect that at this point. He has been doing this for 30 years, and he knows his strengths and he knows his audience; like Woody Allen, he now makes inexpensive movies for a devoted core of followers, and those films deliver reliably enough to satisfy his fans and his investors.

But I also had the feeling that this film satisfied Smith, too, in a way that, maybe, some of his more recent projects haven’t. Home is where the heart is, and maybe the art, too, and there is something warmly playful here. Something forgiving. And that is a sentiment that shows up onscreen at the end of the credits: “Come spend a day at SModcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands NJ!” it reads. “You can totally pay for one movie and then sneak around into all the other theaters.

“If you get caught, tell SModcastle Keeper Ernie O’Donnell, ‘Kev said it was cool.’ ”