This review originally ran June 13, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Festival.
After reaching an apparent artistic and popular breakthrough with “Support the Girls,” Andrew Bujalski sort of returns to Mumblecore, the genre he trail-blazed two decades ago, as necessitated by COVID-19.
“There There,” world premiering at the 2022 Tribeca Festival, visually recalls the D.I.Y. aesthetics from the first decade of the writer-director-editor’s career. Premise-wise, it’s one of those interconnected ensemble pieces that peaked, or perhaps jumped the shark, in the aughts with Paul Haggis’ “Crash.”
Structurally, the film contains six segments separated by transitional overtures of the type more prevalent in the 1970s, except here we see the musician actually performing diegetically.