‘Chasing Summer’ Review: Iliza Shlesinger’s Sexy but Basic Rom-Com Proves the Old Josephine Decker Is Gone

The Josephine Decker you once knew — an auteur behind feverish psychosexual frenzies like “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely” and “Shirley,” and the brashly experimental stage-parenting drama “Madeline’s Madeline” — is no longer. While reinvention is never a bad thing, that’s to say her style has drastically adjusted dating back to her straight-to-Apple-TV YA romance “The Sky Is Everywhere” from 2022. That extends to her latest feature, the homecoming rom-com “Chasing Summer,” one that also feels like it’s destined for streaming. Shot with the bleached visual aesthetic of an Apple TV series, here’s a movie that would have us believe that what happens to millennial Jamie’s (comedian Iliza Shlesinger) life is supposed to be some level of rock bottom when it’s hardly so.

A self-defeating disaster relief worker who can’t get out of her own way, Jamie is between jobs and recently dumped by her boyfriend (David Castañeda) — who’s leaving her for a younger, bouncier colleague. Ahead of an opportunity as an aid worker in Jakarta, she uproots her life and returns to her Texas hometown to emotionally dry out and move back in with her parents (Megan Mullally and Jeff Perry). You may think you’ve seen this before. But when the movie begins, Jamie faces the camera and is asked what she loves about her job, and a montage of natural disasters set to her orgasmic moans on the soundtrack edges us closer to the Decker house style established in the 2010s.

But otherwise, “Chasing Summer” feels like a blandly reassuring teen comedy that happens to star adults, one you’d pop into on Netflix. Decker’s recent push toward what you might call “happier” movies was compelled by personal changes in her life; it feels, though, like a grunge rocker turning into a Top 40 pop star.

Until: Enter up-and-comer Garrett Wareing as Colby, the much-younger boy toy Jamie meets at the requisite Solo-cup-strewn pool party, also torn from the teen comedy playbook. He’s disarmingly sexy and charming, so much so that Jamie can hardly believe he’s taken an interest in her, and so she shoves him away until finally caving for some much-needed, mind-erasing sex (“I could have birthed you,” Jamie tells Colby with regard to their generational difference in age).

Jamie is someone for whom life is always coming at her like a runaway car that she’s put herself in front of. That she’s an aid worker feels metaphorically apt given her way of coming and going temporarily from people’s lives, potentially making them worse, even with earnestly good intentions. Such is the case with her estranged sister, Marissa (Cassidy Freeman), who runs the local roller rink with a Chekhov’s leak in the ceiling.

Jamie is also inexplicably hung up on a former flame, Chase (Tom Welling, unrecognizably far from his “Smallville” days and here looking like a beer-bellied Midwestern dad or even Eric Dane of “Euphoria” days), who is broadly unappealing for a number of reasons. One of which is the fact that at the end of high school, he broke up with her and started a rumor that she tricked him into getting her pregnant. There’s also a clique of sparkly former high school girlfriends with whom Jamie rekindles a tentative friendship, but they don’t get enough screen time to emerge as either best frenemies or true-blue gal pals from the halcyon days of yore.

What’s so wrong with Jamie’s life, and why did she drag herself home knowing full well ahead of time the damage it would dig up? It’s a contrivance that stand-up comedian Shlesinger’s screenplay can’t render believable, and it fails to elicit much sympathy for a woman whose problems are pretty petty. They’re also sharply in contrast to the do-gooding and relief work for much more unfortunate scenarios that she feels passionate about. Mostly, Jamie is crushed by the weight of her own unfulfilled potential, further pointed out by her tinkering, emotionally unhelpful mother. Cue the cliche mother-daughter heart-to-heart in the third act, which Mullally actually does sell.

Eric Branco’s widescreen camera, serving up images that feel curiously small-screen despite the panoramic framing, wheels and whirls around long takes of controlled chaos, bringing to mind off-the-hinges set pieces out of “Punch-Drunk Love.” The inclusion of Shelley Duvall’s “He Needs Me” out of “Popeye” on a soundtrack that also includes Blink-182 and other millennial alt-rock bands underscores Decker’s admiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s nervous, nutty rom-com. As with any Decker film, though, this one doesn’t feel especially reference-driven.

The rush of romance coming at Jamie like a homing missile radiates off the screen thanks to Wareing’s immensely charming breakout turn as a cornfed Texas hottie with a sweet heart. The true nature of Colby’s identity and place in the community, however, is coughed up late into the film via a predictable twist that generates broad laughs but feels below a filmmaker of Decker’s intelligence. Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

I’ll admit it’s unfair to come at “Chasing Summer” ready to make comparisons and hoping for a psyche-plunged female exploration of the likes of Decker’s previous films, in which a woman’s unleashed sexuality regularly becomes an extension of her shattering mind, and a rebellion against social convention. If only “Chasing Summer” were as rebelliously subversive as its sex-positive, central age-gap romance asserts to be.

Grade: C+

“Chasing Summer” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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