Lost memories

Lately I'm having trouble remembering what it was like to be in my 20s. Songs from that era have crept onto the playlist of the Big Oldies station. (And it's both exhilarating and unsettling to shop for produce while Joe Jackson plays on the sound system.) I mean, I can recall the events of that period (space shuttles exploding, dads dying, marriages beginning and then starting to crumble, the popularity of leg warmers, irony). I just no longer have a good sense of what it was like to be in that decade -- What was I thinking? What did we do on a given weekend for fun? What did we worry about? Did we think we were on a path toward fulfillment? Since I've stopped teaching, I don't have a good grasp on the mindset of college students (if I ever did), and now when I'm in a local joint full of 20-somethings I think: It's their culture now. It might still be my generation's world, to some extent -- though, really, we're the monkeys in the middle between the boomers and the millennials, exiles in Portlandia, as far as influence goes -- but the swagger and the moment belong to these kids today. I'm happy to hand it off to them, even if I'm appalled that it can all be contained in an iPhone that fits in the palm of their hands.

Surely I won't glean any true insight from merely watching popular culture. But we're here in this space, so I thought I'd linger on a recent run of movies that explore the lives of young adults.

The most jolting film of my little 20-something film festival is STARLET (B+), a simple tale of a young woman (perhaps not quite even 20, but played by 25-year-old Dree Hemingway) who befriends an old lady. Touching scenes of dog-sitting and bingo-playing, though, are interspersed with images of young Jane interacting with her stoner video-addicted roommates and working her day job as a porn actress (ho-hum). This is a wonderful depiction of misspent youth (and the exploitation of women). Jane buys a thermos from Sadie at a yard sale, insisting on using it as a vase, and when she finds a treasure inside, she tries to return it to Sadie but is rebuffed by the recalcitrant old coot who insists that all sales were final. Mostly out of guilt, apparently, Jane adopts Sadie, driving her to the grocery store (where, no doubt, the 20-year-old and 80-year-old can't relate to the Oldies that are playing) and crashing the bingo parlor. Hemingway (daughter of Mariel) and her partner in crime (and short-shorts) Stella Maeve Johnston ("Runaways") distinctly capture the laconic affectation of glorious, gorgeous youth (especially women) who don't have to try too hard to pay the rent yet seem achingly unfulfilled (whether or not they realize it yet).  Director Sean Baker (the 41-year-old behind "Greg the Bunny") gets the images and the pacing just right. My hunch is that he started out with the idea of the killer ending (the best I've seen, perhaps, since "The Lives of Others") and worked backward from there. So, what do these kids want? A tactile human connection? Who knows. Maybe they won't realize it until they're whiling away the time at a bingo parlor 50 or 60 years down the road.

MARGARET (B+) is harsher than "Starlet" and more attuned to the middle-agers who created it and who anchor its story. "Margaret" tells the story of Lisa Cohen ("True Blood's" Anna Paquin), who in the opening scenes distracts a bus driver to the point of an accident. Lisa tries to comfort the injured woman (Allison Janney, in a brilliant cameo) while awaiting medical help. The rest of the film chronicles Lisa's guilt (again with the guilt!) and frustration at her role in the accident and her complicity in covering up the true story during the investigation. This is Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed follow-up to "You Can Count on Me" (Mark Ruffalo plays the ornery bus driver) and it apparently got edited and re-edited for several years before finally being released in 2011. But the meandering storytelling which perhaps results from that is one of the film's best features; it gives us a sense of Lisa's oddly calm nervous breakdown and search for truth and meaning. Lonergan himself injects a jolt of disaffected middle-age angst as her distant (geographically and emotionally) father, and J. Smith-Cameron (also from "True Blood," as well as "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," speaking of my 20s) nails the role of a mother trying to live her own life while trying to understand and just get along with her volatile daughter. It's during those scenes in particular that the dialogue crackles. (On the other hand, the mother's fledgling relationship with her Italian admirer (Jean Reno) is a major clunker that drags the whole proceedings down a notch.) In some ways, this plays out like a series of hit-and-miss vignettes, but when it clicks (a coffee meeting with a lawyer who explains employment and tort law; Lisa matter-of-factly losing her virginity to a snotty Kieran Culkin) it fills you with hope. In the end, you forgive the missteps and savor the meltdown and awakening of a young woman who literally stared death in the face, tried to reconcile her responsibility for harming another human, and, finally, runs over and around those in her path, like a running back, as she hurtles blindly toward some form of redemption. A lovely mess.

At the other end of the angst scale, we find FOUND MEMORIES (B+), filmed in the misty memories of the ancient residents of a tiny South American town who get nudged out of their monotonous routines by a visit from, yes, a 20-something young woman. We are lulled at first by the repetitive relationship between Madalena who makes the bread and Antonio who makes the coffee for the ancient church-going townsfolk, the youngest of whom seems to be a middle-aged priest, who probably feels 25 compared to these slow-moving geezers. Young Rita (Lisa Favero, looking like an androgynous Jennifer Beals) is a photographer who's just happens to have followed the train tracks to this town, and she starts documenting Madalena's bread-making and other ghostly images of the village, with the padlocked cemetery as her holy grail. At night she sips hooch with one of the local booze-hounds. At one point, we are shocked out of this 18th century existence as Rita dances to a Franz Ferdinand song playing in her earbuds. Will Rita stick around? Will she unlock the cemetery -- for her and for the others on its doorstep? Will she crumble under the adoring, imploring gazes of her elders who look to her for some fountain of youth? It's all rather touching and, at times, mesmerizing.

Finally, my most recent rental was 10 YEARS (B), about a 10-year high school reunion (held, apparently, at Albuquerque's Hotel Andaluz, where it was filmed) featuring an engaging, appealing cast of young actors. This one doesn't go very far or unlock any deep secrets, but it exceeded my expectations and touched me. Director Jamie Linden (who wrote "We Are Marshall") gets a lot of the little details right (like how karaoke works and the awkwardness of rekindled conversations) and creates a believable world of friendships and nostalgia. Channing Tatum (whom I loved in "Magic Mike," which will show up in my year-ender, any day now) and Chris Pratt ("Parks and Recreation," wonderful here as he drunkenly tries to make up with the nerds he bullied in high school) lead a strong cast. Aubrey Plaza is nicely understated. Kate Mara (looking a lot like my buddy's wife from our own post-grad years) and Oscar Isaac are a revelation as former classmates trying to reignite a fleeting spark from 10 years earlier. Not much insight here -- mainly a lot of banter and flirting -- but a solid 100 minutes.

So, what have we learned? I suspect that my 20s involved some mindless feeling around in the dark for something a little more substantial than my culture was offering me -- but more often than not distracting myself with pop culture offerings (like Jennifer Beals in leg warmers in "Flashdance," say). With a few decades now of perspective, I'm thinking that, as we age, we gradually gain insight into how the world works, how other humans work, how, say, a furnace or an electrical system, works. (What 26-year-old truly cares about any of that, even gives any of it a second thought?) With the knowledge that we acquire comes a burden. Now that we know how that stuff works, we also know how it all breaks down -- whoa, nothing lasts forever -- and so we try to balance fear or anxiety with patience and understanding. Add in the first true inklings of mortality, and we find ourselves hoping that a burst of young energy, like a fresh breeze, blows into our community and distracts us from our routine and from the rusting padlock on the cemetery gate.

BONUS TRACK - Joe Jackson and the opposite sex: