Movie Review: Why should anyone care what means “Everything to Me?”

“Everything to Me” is a coming-of-age dramedy so inconsequential as to make one question how it ever got financed and shot.

Skipping past the still rarish nature of such tales told from the point of view of girls and young women, it’s still ninety minutes of nothing, and that should matter.

Writer-director Kayci Lacob frames her debut feature with the dullest author’s public book reading ever, and trots through an utterly conventional collection of genre cliches as she tries to make the story of a child-teen-coed obsessed with becoming Steve Jobs interesting. She fails.

Our heroine (Victoria Pedretti) strolls, uncertainly, into a San Francisco book store where the crowd for her reading from her memoir “The Book of Jobs” is around the block. The tech corridor/Silicon Valley proximity might explain the line. Or the author’s runway model-looks on the back cover might be a lure.

But once Claudia Lerner begins to read, Pedretti — who must have more expressions in her actor’s bag of tricks than this colorless deadpan — and the screenplay bore us so close to death that paramedics and an electronic defibrillilator should be standing by anybody watching.

The “book” all the film’s voice-over narration that follows is taken from is lifeless, drab — lacking the music of narrative, a compelling story or even a gift for the language.

Little Claudia (Eliza Donaghy, then Abigail Donaghy) grew up in this corner of the world determined to be Steve Jobs. Not “the next Steve Jobs.” Jobs was a visionary so focused and driven that she quotes his “wisdom” from her tweens onward, a kid determined to copy Jobs right down to his famous/infamous “reality distortion field,” which helped him badger his underlings to achieve the impossible and create a future no one else could conceive.

Claudia makes friends (Lola Flanery) in spite of this monomaniacal drive. She’s got a plan — excel, achieve, check off all the boxes that will get her into Stanford, which she figures is her ticket into Silicon Valley, fame, wealth and glory.

She won’t let her stop-and-live-a-balanced-life preaching biology teacher (Utkarsh Ambudkar, not bad), her parents’ (Judy Greer and Rich Sommer) failing marriage or Mom’s cancer diagnosis get in the way.

The script hints a couple of times that it will be about something actually substantial. Does adult Claudia have tales to tell of the toxic sexism of Silicon Valley? Mom’s abandoned engineering career is another indicator that something consequential is to come.

But as we oh-so-slowly drift through Claudia’s clciched account of her school years — with pauses for benchmarks such as first menstruation (played “cute,” but kind of cringy) — chapters with inane titles from “Black Smoke” to “Contagion” to “Dumbledore” pointlessly break the tedious story up.

And never for one moment does the dialogue rise above Daily Inspiration Calendar quips.

“Life is not a means to an end…Vulnerability is a gift. It makes us better.”

Lacob got her movie made, somehow. But all she has to show for her efforts — let’s hope they didn’t actually spend money to take this picture to Italy to film this insipid “class trip” sequence — is to make the only film Judy Greer ever appeared in that has nothing other than her to recommend it.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Abigail Donaghy, Eliza Donaghy, Victoria Pedretti, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Lola Flanery, Rich Sommer and Judy Greer

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kayci Lacob. A Bullseye release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:30

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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