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‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ Review: Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney in an Earnest Shambles of a Family Theater Comedy

Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney play regional theater producers, lugging their sons around, in a movie too synthetic to convince you of anything.

Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who’s in middle school, is a total theater kid: addicted to the stage, unapologetically gay, given to having fantasy conversations with idols like Noel Coward and Ruth Gordon and Tallulah Bankhead, who pop up in the movie to counsel him. He has to deal with the intense homophobia of Middle America in the late ’80s, but at least he knows who he is — a kid who looks like he stepped out of “Glee” by way of “Footloose.” He’s the nominal hero of the movie, and there are moments when you wish that “Everything’s Going to Be Great” could just be a gay coming-of-age film, a theater-bug “Perks of Being a Wallflower.” I never totally bought Macy’s romantic betrayal of Buddy, and I also didn’t buy it when she ditches out of the five-year contract they’ve landed to produce shows in Milwaukee, because her decision makes no financial sense.

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