I Used to Go Here (2020)

(On Cable TV, August 2021) I’m a forgiving audience for movies about writers, but even my best intentions left me unmoved by I Used to Go Here, a riff on the “coming home” subgenre that sees a writer struggling with an underperforming first novel and a broken-off engagement being asked to go back to the small-town campus where she was a superstar student. The film follows how she clearly enjoys the regression back to a simpler time — revisiting her old room in town, hobnobbing with younger students, and flirting with the idea of a teaching position. Gillian Jacobs (as the writer) and Jemaine Clement (as a mentor) are the two biggest names in this low-budget, low-stakes dramatic comedy. (There’s also Kate Micucci, but she’s practically unrecognizable here and not used to her fullest potential.)  I Used to Go Here is not unpleasant to watch, although the lack of self-awareness from the protagonist is grating, and the abrupt character development at the conclusion is not particularly convincing. As a movie-about-a-writer, it plays things cynically but still indulges in romanticism about writers in the post-honeymoon phase of their first novel. (Although, now that I write this, I realize that I have far more knowledge of genre writers for whom a first novel is not a capstone as much as the start of a far more prosaic and mercenary process — by the time their first novel is published, they have usually finished their second and are starting a third.)  The film could have done more to puncture the regression enjoyed by the protagonist even if writer/director Kris Rey does carry the narrative from one point to the other in entertaining fashion. There’s a great sequence in which a young man has a terrific evening enjoying mundane things with a middle-aged woman after being “caught” in some nonsense scheme — the film could have used more of that loopiness. Alas, by the time it’s over, I Used to Go Here is so inconsequential that it practically leaves no impression. Not a terrible choice, but somewhat of an underwhelming one.