Jamie’s life is as much a natural disaster as the ones she helped clean up, at least that’s how it feels in her mind. Dumped from her job working for Helpers at Home, a tornado relief program that provides humanitarian aid to disaster-torn areas, and unceremoniously dumped by her now-ex (David Castañeda) who intended on bringing her to a mission trip to Jakarta, Jamie is stuck doing the one thing she’s avoided for years: returning to her hometown. Simple premise for a coming-of-adult-age dramedy that has been done again and again, but Iliza Shlesinger, who stars as Jamie and produced and wrote the film, wanted a more artistic eye to really help this formulaic but personal and nostalgic story really stand out. Perhaps that ambition was an overreach.

Josephine Decker, whose short but visually experimental filmography includes Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley are films that take advantage of dream-like imagery, eye-popping colors, and unconventional camera and editing choices, and bringing such a vision to such a standard story should feel like an elevation. In some ways, it’s impressive to watch the ways in which Decker chooses to frame each shot, to be intrigued by the way she uses color to light different spaces of a room in a scene. How she chooses to use the rhythms of montage to explain the crisis going on in Jamie’s head. But the style begins to come in service of a story that doesn’t really require flashy techniques and instead becomes a distraction. When Chasing Summer works best, it’s in the casual moments when it embraces the standard “one important summer” through Shelisinger’s voice as a comedian.

Most famous for her comedy specials and stand-up, Shlesinger is a unabashed millenial, and her script does a fairly good job defining Jamie’s character and her relationship to her past youth, in the ways it comforts her (burned CDs, backyard keggers, roller skating, celebrity posters on her bedroom wall) and in the ways it warped her reality, misconceptions of pieces of her past and the people she grew up with. She’s still head-over-heels crushing over her high school boyfriend Chase (Tom Welling), who now is married with a family. She has a contentious relationship with her sister Marissa (Cassidy Freeman), who has been stuck in their Texas hometown her entire life running the local roller skating rink and dealing with the building’s many flaws on a constant basis (“the weight of unfulfilled potential”, she calls herself) .

After being invited to a “Gen-Z” by one of Marissa’s young employees, Jamie even strikes a sizzling romance with a young twenty-something named Colby (Garrett Wareing). “I could have birthed you,” she jokes to him. Her parents (Megan Mullally and Jeff Perry) accept her life decisions and even embrace her new May-December romance, but they barely understand her, wanting the best for her and also wanting her to stick around. Dealt with juggling two new love interests after a sudden breakup, career ambitions out the window, a metaphorical but literal collapsing roof, and all of the ghosts of her past surrounding her, Jamie is torn between adapting back to the place that raised her and finding a way back out.

For as messy as Jamie’s life is, it’s not a complicated narrative for the audience, one that especially will be head-banging to the “Teenage Dirtbag” and “Fat Lip” needledrops. Jamie’s nostalgia for the summer of 2001 is an illness, ever-morphing her personality depending on who she’s with, sliding back into old habits wherever it comforts her in a given moment. She’s a bird who got to spread her wings and fly for a brief window of time before winding up back in the nest. After that short, fulfilling life experience, she’s able to see her old classmates and neighbors now through a different, sadder lens, pessimistic at all the ways they haven’t grown or changed. For fans of Jason Reitman’s Young Adult (2011): a Mavis Gary view of the world. Something that becomes more true the older we get. There is a revelation toward the end that bursts the logic bubble on how small this town really is that nobody would have caught on to inform Jamie of a particularly important piece of information, but leading up to that moment, a lot of what Shlesinger is trying to say about our relationship to the place that made us who we are hits some profound beats.

But those beats could land within a straight-forward, focused, and performance-reliant comedic vision, and Decker’s sumptuous and kaleidoscopic eye doesn’t seem interested in making a comedy whatsoever, yanking us out of certain moments and not letting Shlesinger’s voice speak for itself. Shlesinger’s performance is emotionally grounded and sympathetic, but never lets her comic timing shine outside of a few solid chuckle-worthy line deliveries. It’s a funny-enough film, but the overall tone mutes a lot of what could be stronger laughs. I’ll admit, it’s an odd critique to complain about a filmmaker actually doing something interesting with “standard” material, but it’s a noticeable clash. Like if Andrea Arnold directed American Pie.