Critics reviews

Despite the spruced-up production values and leaps down the rabbit hole, the film remains true to the Byington spirit—snapshots of life bursting with disappointment and desperation, dished up tongue in cheek, laced with offbeat wit, and offered in a spirit of fun.

The formalized performances and epigrammatic dialogue join with the story in evoking a yearning for cosmic order and—through all the tangled and torn connections—for the bonds of family and friendship. Though Byington's own detachment and that of his characters never quite coalesce into a fully realized worldview, his moods and tones, as well as his comic inventions, deliver a sharp mnemonic bite.

Everything from the scrupulously listless acting and cutesy score to the lack of effort expended on any kind of narrative conviction is part of the bone-dry hipster joke—including the fact that viewers are sitting there, probably deadpanning in sync.

Byington's perspective may be above it all, but that doesn't quite account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly in lines of dialogue and in some of the performances. Though the filmmaker focuses mostly on Max and, in a sense, dares to adopt his detached attitude toward the events in his life, Sal is, in many ways, the real heart and soul of Somebody Up There Likes Me.

For most people, however, Bob Byington's fifth feature—his best-known previous film was 2009's equally gormless Harmony And Me—will play like the worst kind of performance art, in which contempt for conventional entertainment functions like a badge of integrity. You have to work pretty damn hard to make Nick Offerman this unfunny.

The main actors never age, but that—like most other budget-driven inconsistencies in the film—is something we're meant to smirk at. The repetitive score keeps hitting a sad-trumpet noise. There's talent here, but the goal seems to be proving that everyone involved is too cool to make an actual movie.

Bob Byington's imaginative indie comedy recalls some of Richard Lester's 60s films (The Knack . . . And How to Get It; How I Won the War) in its freewheeling narrative structure and cartoonish sight gags, though the humor is more often peculiar than laugh-out-loud funny.

This is a film that is all about detachment, both formal and, for lack of a better word, humanistic. In fact, the two are intimately connected. Byington by no means expects us to take the world (or "world") he's created for us onscreen for granted, as some kind of quasi-verisimilar universe. In fact, the rather cryptic title is actually a fundamental interpretive key to this highly bizarre film.