Yet "Momma's Man" is gentle enough to be a comedy as well. When we first meet Mikey (Matt Boren), he's heading to JFK after a weekend visiting his mother (Flo Jacobs) and father (Ken Jacobs). In Los Angeles await his wife (Dana Varon) and their year-old daughter. The subway arrives at the airport shuttle; he can't get off. He returns to his parents' apartment, making vague excuses about getting bumped from his flight.
Days turn into weeks, and Mikey clings, barnacle-like, to the flotsam of his childhood: rereading old comics, going through his Garbage Pail Kids collection, playing guitar and singing awful adolescent lyrics he scribbled in notebooks years before. Physically, Boren is built on George Costanza lines, and his Mikey seems swaddled in spiritual baby-fat. After a while, he turns off his cellphone so he can't hear his wife's pleas to come home. Anyway, he is home.
Jacobs is on to something here: the panic of kids raised during the '80s and '90s as they look around and realize they're adults. Mikey and his knuckleheaded childhood friend Dante (Piero Arcilesi) are still Beastie Boys on some level, but they no longer have to fight for their right to party, and it scares the bejesus out of them.
So Mikey curls fetally inward, refusing to leave the apartment and playing out ancient spats with his perplexed parents. The angry yet satisfied expression on his face when Dad tells him to keep the music down says it all: This is his last teenage rebellion, and he wants it to last forever.
The multiplex version of "Momma's Man" would probably star Ben Stiller as Mikey, and Diane Keaton and Al Pacino as Mom and Dad. It would be an obvious, knockabout affair that took place in the suburbs, and it would have a healthy DVD afterlife. Jacobs, by contrast, is shooting for a tone of elliptical poetry, and casting his own parents goes a long way toward realizing it.
