Critics reviews

There's a purifying pleasure to it: The writing and performances delight in making us see who these characters are, merely by letting us tag along as they think and talk, shoot the shit, analyze each other, make amends, and whatever else. It's a movie that, despite being set in my own time, makes me miss an era I wasn't around to see—one that I only feel like I know because of movies like this.

Person to Person also tantalizes with a dream-team pairing of Michael Cera (Arrested Development) and Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) in a storyline that hits comedic high notes early on but ultimately feels squandered. That’s the downside of a script that reaches for a human touch but sometimes winds up pulling its punches.

Person to Person is a thoughtful film. It artfully conceives idiosyncrasies and leaves the viewer to grapple with their relevance, replicating the discerning doubt in the minds of the protagonists. This feature requires pensive attention but it gives generously in return.

Person to Person, an ensemble piece which hails back to early John Sayles and Jim Jarmusch for inspiration but doesn’t quite live up to its heavyweight influences.

For a film so set on understatement, both comedic and dramatic, Person to Person is surprisingly affecting. Tender moments, like when one character does laundry for a depressed friend, or when a remorseful man apologizes to his girlfriend, are all the more touching because they come in the midst of so much insouciance. The dialogue is meandering and overwrought, in a way that will annoy some but makes a zinger really sing.

[I]f you’re in the mood for something shaggy and loose that won’t challenge you too much, maybe you’ll enjoy writer/director Dustin Guy Defa’s affectionate and sporadically sweet indie. It’s got a low-key rhythm that might provide a pleasing alternative to the noisy spectacle of summer blockbusters. Or it might just seem pointless.

Defa, a prolific director of short films making his first feature since 2011's Bad Fever, has developed a feel for American eccentricity that brings to mind Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater in its best moments, albeit in a scruffier style... It's a film of ephemeral pleasures, adorned in a rich variety of voices, non-verbal gestures, and speech patterns: unfussy, unrushed, at times very funny.

A web of breezy vignettes that perfectly captures the experience of living in New York City circa 2017 by way of 1979... A delicate sense of humor helps maintain the film's upbeat pace while scenes of intense emotion are mostly wordless... Defa's swift editing enables Person to Person to skip effortlessly across its plotlines, each of which deals with the theme of connection.

The uneven quality of Person to Person‘s stories and the inconsequential feel of much of what happens make the film feel a little like a stroll through the city. Stretches in which a lot is happening, none of it of particular interest, are broken up by some intriguing interactions and snippets of entertaining overhead conversation.

Defa has assembled a staggering troupe: There are indie-canon luminaries (Michael Cera, Philip Baker Hall), fashionable television stars (Broad City's Abbi Jacobson), and a number of minor actors and nonprofessionals whose obscurity and inexpertise don't begin to suggest the prodigious volume of their talent.

Odd to say of a movie that dedicates a fair amount of its runtime to loafing around during the mid-afternoon and shooting the shit, but there's a real sense of urgency about Person to Person, a plenitude that is very winning, and the film contains a couple of close-ups—of Sample, destitute and begging forgiveness, of Gevinson suddenly aflutter and overwhelmed during an awkward make-out—that access surprising depths of feeling.

There are plenty of characters and there is plenty of New York City in writer/director Dustin Guy Defa‘s Person To Person, but the whole thing meanders all over without ever really settling somewhere that matters.