Critic's Notebook

Brett Roedel/Disney

A group of 35-year-olds are pulled back into high school in “Never Change!,” through petty bureaucracy rather than magical body-swap or cinematic fable. It seems the graduating class of 2008 at North Meadows High School never technically graduated. Now they must spend two weeks back in the classroom to complete coursework and receive diplomas, under onerous legislation called the Education New Deal. Their original school days were curtailed by a destructive tornado, i.e. by a rare natural event rather than one of the frequent unnatural events that interrupt the education of U.S. high school students in the real world, or end their lives altogether. Marty Schousboe’s comedy, screening at Tribeca Festival en route to streaming on Hulu, makes one direct mention of this parallel, of the risk for any student that coming to school might mean they don’t make it to 35 at all: a teacher notes that compared to 2008, modern high-school can be “a bit funky.”

Refined comedy this is not; but Mr. Schousboe and writer John Reynolds aren’t pretending otherwise. “Never Change!” exclamation-mark is raucous farce, with a roll call of buffoons swearing profusely and coming to terms with the various ways their lives have gone nowhere. Katie (Sofia Black-D’Elia) has done best, becoming a local TV anchor; her former jock boyfriend, rejoicing in the best possible former jock boyfriend name of Sunny Football (Mr. Reynolds), has remained rooted to the spot. Curtis (Gary Richardson) wanted to be an actor but has never been the same since he was abducted by aliens, a plot point the film means seriously. Literate articulate Amelia (Jo Firestone) is stuck married to an appalling twit and has drifted out of her classmates’ memories altogether. If these goofballs fail to pass their acute two-week educational challenge together, they will be forced back into class alongside the actual teenagers – a horrifying prospect.

Although everyone curses as if they were in the Marine Corps, the characters are soft enough on the inside to come to terms with their youthful natures, which are naturally their adult natures, too. Opening a batch of personal time-capsules left over from 2008, all are suitably embarrassed by the childish things put away inside, although in the film’s one gold-plated visual gag someone lifts out a string of the lethal green VX nerve toxins from “The Rock” before very carefully putting them back. Circling around their own longed-for feel-better conclusion, the urban 30somethings of modern America are urged to find the passion and drive they once possessed, to seek not a second chance but just one chance every day. But a second chance is what this is. The Millennial’s curse: left behind by their own young on a planet of climate collapse and compelled to take refuge back in adolescence hoping everything blows over.