Rating: PG | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: February 24th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Shout! Studios
Director(s): Colin West
Writer(s): Colin West

I’m suggesting that perhaps the universe in our heads is more real than reality itself.

The mind is a curious thing. Especially when you don’t have a “brain toothbrush” as Dr. Alvin (Tony Shalhoub) would say. It’s what makes Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) so affably charismatic and yet so awkwardly detached. He’s an astronomer who dreamt of being an astronaut—constantly looking up at the stars despite always wanting to swim through them.

It’s the same with life. Cameron was inspired to create a television program with his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn), teaching kids about science in fun ways that only cemented their love. But now he does it alone, shunted off to the midnight slot, while she’s gone buttoned-up and serious working at a museum. Their daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) sees it too. She struggles with that chasm between being what society demands and braving its ire by choosing what she wants instead.

Colin West’s Linoleum takes a heightened, almost fantastical look at this trio trying to find footing in a world that labels them outcasts. Do they lean into the designation to accomplish something fantastic (no matter how small or personal “fantastic” may prove)? Or do they buckle to the pressure and “grow up” into something more respectable than happy?

Add Nora’s new classmate Marc (Gabriel Rush) to the equation—son of Cameron’s more successful yet less understanding doppelgänger who just moved to town to take over his show—and the parallels become unavoidable. Two pairs striving to find common ground. To survive expectations. To throw caution to the wind. It becomes like looking at a mirror into the past and/or future to discover it’s never easy. But it doesn’t need to be impossible either.

I don’t want to say too much since the climax packs an affecting punch once clarity arrives in the form of contextual repetition and overt connections. I’ll just say that West is telling a non-linear story through a linear filter that, as he puts it, centers “tone” rather than “time.” The experience is therefore akin to jumbled memories—a scrapbook with the pages shuffled. The people are the same and the motives consistent, but the package must take on a life of its own to find sense amidst the chaos.

Maybe that arrives in the form of outlandish events like a car falling from the sky or a spaceship lodging itself in Cameron and Erin’s backyard. Maybe it’s having Gaffigan play dual roles with a purpose beyond just the gag of everyone saying they look alike. Maybe it’s the woman (Elisabeth Henry) always watching Cameron and Marc from a distance.

Bring in Cameron’s dementia-riddled engineer father (Roger Hendricks Simon) to perhaps assist in transforming those space scraps into a rocket inside his garage and the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place. I guess it might be more accurate to say the puzzle starts to separate into multiple pictures that should actually be read in sequence rather than simultaneously.

The main quartet of Gaffigan, Seehorn, Nacon, and Rush are fantastic with the quirky comedy shifting to a profoundly poignant realization that dreams don’t have to be won all at once or in their initial forms. The filmmaking had me recalling Donnie Darko at times with the script’s structure reminding me of the under-seen Boys in the Trees. It’s a thrilling, sometimes heavy, drama about love, identity, and individuality that takes you to the ever-expanding universe of us.

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Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM; courtesy of Shout! Studios.