Sacramento is a good-not-great entry into the buddy road trip genre. It won’t blow you away, but if you’re a fan of its cast—Michael Cera, Michael Angarano, and Kristen Stewart included—there’s enough charm here to make it worth the ride.
‘Sacramento’ Movie Review
Sacramento (2025) is far from the first buddy road trip movie to chart familiar ground, but it has a few ingredients that set it up to at least feel a little different—chief among them, Michael Cera stepping into full-on adult mode as a father-to-be. It’s a quietly poetic full-circle moment for those who watched Cera rise to stardom in Superbad and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, playing crass, awkward teens with just enough heart to carry entire films. But even as he ages into more mature roles, there’s something about his delivery—soft-spoken, endearingly anxious, a little emotionally distant—that still makes it feel like he’s playing the same guy in different outfits.
That sense of repetition isn’t fatal to Sacramento, but it does underscore its biggest flaw: this is a nice movie, maybe even a sweet one, but it’s not particularly memorable. Directed and co-written by Michael Angarano (who also stars), the film follows Glenn (Cera), a man grappling with impending fatherhood and the gnawing fear that he might not be up to the task. His pregnant wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) is sympathetic but visibly stressed by his anxiety. When Rickey (Angarano), Glenn’s long-lost and wildly eccentric childhood friend, shows up out of nowhere and invites him on a road trip to Sacramento to scatter his father’s ashes (a lie, it turns out), Rosie encourages Glenn to go—hoping the journey will help him recalibrate before the baby arrives.
What follows is a low-stakes, heart-on-its-sleeve trip up the California coast as the two men reconnect and confront their diverging paths into adulthood. Rickey, who’s also on a redemptive mission to reconcile with Tallie (Maya Erskine), a woman he had a brief, whirlwind romance with and abandoned after getting her pregnant, mirrors Glenn’s own emotional uncertainties. These two parallel arcs—one about stepping up for a child you’re about to meet, the other about stepping back into the life of one you left—form the quiet backbone of the film.
There are some lovely moments here. Cera and Angarano have genuine chemistry, and the film has the kind of small, cozy emotional beats that have long defined indie dramedies. But that’s also part of the problem. Sacramento often feels like a movie you’ve already seen, maybe several times over—especially if you frequent the kind of Sundance-adjacent films it so closely resembles, even though it actually premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2024. It’s soft, it’s lightly funny, and it never pushes its characters—or its audience—too far out of their comfort zones.
Kristen Stewart, unfortunately, feels underused here. She gives the kind of performance that could have been filmed over a weekend, and while she lends a certain gravitas by sheer presence alone, Rosie feels more like an idea than a fully realized character. That sense of being half-formed lingers around the film’s edges; for all its attempts at heart and introspection, Sacramento never quite locks into something uniquely its own.
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Still, there’s something to be said for a film that knows what it is and doesn’t overreach. Sacramento is a good-not-great entry into the buddy road trip genre. It won’t blow you away, but if you’re a fan of its cast—or the indie dramedy flavor of films like The Way Way Back or Little Miss Sunshine—there’s enough charm here to make it worth the ride.
Score: 6/10
Sacramento (2025)
- Cast: Michael Cera, Michael Angarano, Maya Erskine, Kristen Stewart
- Director: Michael Angarano
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Runtime: 89 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: April 11 2025
- Movies Like Sacramento: Rye Lane, Fly Me to the Moon, We Live in Time