Hand me any coming-of-age comedy made in the last ten years, and ten bucks says its central message is pretty much, "growing up is hard to do." Throw in a little bit of romance, and it's that losing your virginity is a bit more complex than just checking off another box on your to-do list. But although Lymelife does deal with the trials and tribulations of making it from 15 to 16 and from virgin to non-virgin, its beauty is that it looks at not only the rocky path to adulthood but also the less-than-perfect journey that still remains when you get there.

The story of two families living on Long Island in the 1970s, Lymelife is a movie about the American Dream, the American Man, and the reality that neither are even close to all they are cracked up to be. At the center of the film is Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), the 15-year-old son of wealthy developer Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) and his wife Brenda Bartlett (Jill Hennessy). Home for a visit is his older brother, US Army man Jimmy Bartlett (Kieran Culkin). Just down the road are the Braggs—Adrianna (Emma Roberts), Scott's lifelong crush; Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), Mickey's assistant; and Charlie (Timothy Hutton), a victim of Lyme Disease. And living smack dab in the middle of grand dreams, great expectations, and disappointing realities, let's just say that the Bartletts and the Braggs don't exactly turn out to be the Bradys.

As the movie's tagline tells us: "The American Dream Sucks," and in case we had any doubts, Lymelife is there to tell us why. With more money comes more problems, with more image comes less reality, with more intimate connections come more volatile conflicts, and with more ability to build our own lives comes more opportunity to screw them up. Throw on top of that the reality that as much as this world is one in which our efforts can bring our dreams to life, it is also one in which the only thing we can really control is ourselves. As Mickey tells his wife before heading off on a "hunting trip," "We don't actually kill anything; I started using blanks like you asked me to." As Mickey tells Scott, when his father was dying of lung cancer, the doctors weren't telling him to stop smoking, they were telling him to keep it up. As Charlie says to Mickey, "What amazes me is that this tiny little bug no bigger than a pimple on your ass changes everything." And as we see as their story unfolds, less a perfect realization, the American Dreams is much more of an empty illusion, a toxic nightmare, and fragile fantasy.

But as a story very much about what it means to be a man, what is expected of men, and the relationships between men and their families, what I found almost as interesting as the film itself are the various individuals involved in it. There are Derick and Steven Martini, the brothers who co-wrote the script that was inspired by their own adolescence. Filling in for them in the movie are real-life brothers Rory and Kieran Culkin, two young men whose life as child actors has definitely given them their own unique adolescent stories. Playing Scott's philandering father is Alec Baldwin, a man who has had his own share of highly publicized problems stemming from his own divorce and custody battle. In fact, from the young Culkins to Oscar-winning Hutton, almost every man in Lymelife has been a part of a broken family.

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