I hope we get at least one Snack Shack a year. Movies about the greatest summer of my life as a kid never get old. Literally, they’re permanently set in their specific time and place. And figuratively, they are usually about growing up, something every person has to do at some point in their life. You’ll all start filling in the details of your own great summer as you enjoy hanging out in Snack Shack’s, untethered from reality for 90 minutes of pure nostalgic bliss.
Apparently writer director Adam Rehmeier’s summer of a lifetime was on the Iowa/Nebraska border: Nebraska City, in 1991. There, Adam’s presumable stand in AJ (Conor Sherry) is dealing with standard suburb junior/senior in high school concerns. His high strung parents Judge (David Costabile) and Jean (Gillian Vigman) want to send AJ to military school. Why? AJ and his buddy Moose (Gabriel LaBelle) engage in harmless illegal hustles like off track betting and alcohol brewing. Needing a job to stay in town, AJ and Moose use their savings to buy the Snack Shack at the local pool. This little hustle hopefully will give the pair some street cred as well with their older buddy Shane (Nick Robinson) home from a military stint, and for AJ especially, Brooke (Mika Abdalla), the literal girl next door who just got a lifeguard position at the Snack Shack’s pool.
Snack Shack is banking on nostalgia for movies like Superbad, or The Sandlot, or The Way Way Back. The beats of the story should be familiar to anyone who’s watched any film in this genre before. Adam Rehmeier does his two jobs well: keep the movie movin, and plant us in a specific time and place. Nebraska City looks a lot like The Last Picture Show’s Texas small town, but missing Peter Bogdanovich’s allegorical decay. This is basically a really nice small town, with one big main street that has everything you could want to do in the Midwest as a teenager: movies, community pool, drink in various bars/backyards, grilling, fishing, late night burger eating, drunk driving, etc. 1991 is a perfect year to pick: you can be mostly modern, but have no cell phones, forcing your characters to hang out out of boredom when the real magic happens. The movie vignettes us between a new place in the town every 5-10 minutes, giving us a snapshot of AJ’s life in his hometown and the day to day experiences he must have had during one of those life-changing summers with the most important people in his life at the time. A lot of Snack Shack’s success relies on you seeing yourself in this town, of which I definitely could, recounting very similar experiences with a friend, or a summer girlfriend, or the local hangout spot.
But the movie works most of all because of the winning cast, mostly unknown. The big standout is Gabriel LaBelle as Moose, AJ’s best bud. Having had his coming of age as Steven Spielberg already, LaBelle is suburban chaos incarnate, dragging the more settled AJ out of his comfort zone with his unwavering confidence in himself and his mission to make some dolla dolla bills y’all. As someone who also grew up on a more conservative household, I saw a lot of myself in Conor Sherry’s performance. He’s basically reacting to life: content to learn as he goes from the people he cares for, gaining confidence along the way. Sherry holds his own against LaBelle’s flashier performance, and does a decent job in the more emotional stuff with Nick Robinson and Mika Abdalla. Robinson also has graduated from the high school movie, so he’s perfectly cast as the slightly older mentor Shane: clearly who Conor hopes to become as their personalities match wonderfully. Mika Abdalla is clearly fulfilling a lot of manic pixie checkboxes, but she’s at least her own person here, the most mature out of anyone in this film because of her life experiences.
Come on, who doesn’t love snacks? When I think of a movie like Snack Shack, like Oreo’s or a cold Coke on a warm day, or concession stand hot dogs, I get a goofy smile on my face, as I’m transported to somewhere else that feels like a warm hug. So Bravo, Adam Rehmeier. Nebraska City, for at least an hour and a half, made me want to visit the community water park again. At least the one near me was simply splashtastic! Beat that!