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There’s a high probability that you’ve seen Sunny Sandler on screen before: Thanks to the patronage of her ceaselessly prolific dad, Adam, the 17-year-old has amassed 26 film credits to date. In “Don’t Say Good Luck,”
however, you’ll actually notice her. As a teenager likewise stepping into the spotlight for the first time — and, in rather more bittersweet circumstances, facing the end of childhood — she’s the warmly gawky, thoroughly believable center of Julia Hart’s sensitive, open-hearted theater-kid portrait. She’s matched beat for beat by Melanie Lynskey, no revelation but reliably affecting and emotionally generous as our heroine’s doting, ailing mother. Coming-of-age films with variations of these characters and dynamics come around pretty often; rather more unusual are those written and played with this degree of care and compassion.
The latest collaboration between Netflix and Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, “Don’t Say Good Luck” is markedly more delicate and deeply felt than most films bearing that imprint, though it’s still proudly mainstream in sensibility — unafraid of sentimentality as it lunges directly and most effectively for viewers’ heartstrings. Hart’s family-friendly “Stargirl” films for Disney+ showed she could balance mega-streamer house style with human-feeling storytelling; her more adventurous 2018 superhero indie “Fast Color” demonstrated a mature, cross-generational approach to frequently juvenile genre fare.
Those skills serve Hart well in her broadly empathetic latest, which should play relatably both to adolescents beginning to assert identities outside their parents’ control, as well as to elders grappling with a lifelong duty of care to their children and an obligation, sooner or later, to let go. For suburban mom-of-three Elizabeth (Lynskey), who balances childcare with a job running a popular local deli alongside her husband Ted (Max Greenfield), that may be too soon: Years after beating cancer, she’s dismayed to learn it has returned, this time with a tougher prognosis.
The script, co-written by Hart and producer/partner Jordan Horowitz with story scribe Laura Hankin, limns this crisis without any of the usual expository medical-consultation scenes; the focus throughout is intimately domestic, as Elizabeth reckons not just with her health but with how to alternately protect and prepare her family in the face of a worst-case scenario. Her boisterous pre-teen twins Ethan and Caleb are too young to grasp quite what’s at stake; high school sophomore Sophie (Sandler) has rather more vivid memories of going through this anguish before.
But Sophie has a lot on her plate besides, beginning with the lead role in her school’s ambitious spring production of the Broadway musical “Waitress” — an unexpected coup over resident drama-club queen Mallory (an excellent Elyse Bell, bringing more nuance to this nascent-diva role than initially meets the eye), after her unassuming but purely sung audition strikes a chord with kindly teacher/director Ms. Parker (Stephanie Beatriz). It’s more work and pressure than she bargained for, putting strain on her relationship with longtime best friend Carolyn (Scarlett Estevez), who’s on her own path of queer self-discovery, and that’s before mounting family drama makes it increasingly hard for her to leave everything behind on stage.
There’s a lot of room here for flat teen-movie stereotypes, but “Don’t Say Good Luck” — the title a running bit between Sophie and Elizabeth, who cherishes her daughter’s thespian dreams — is persistently, pleasingly fair to all involved, finding complicating seams of vulnerability in characters set up as foils or antagonists. Jack (Jack Champion), Sophie’s handsome co-lead and crush, is neither dreamboat nor dickhead, just a boy not yet in command of his various talents; Linda (Bebe Neuwirth), Elizabeth’s officious mother, may run a little cold, but controls what she can to counter life’s ungovernable cruelties. As family tensions build, her sweeter other half Dale, played with winningly soft squareness by Steve Buscemi, gives Sophie the plain, solid advice she needs: “You can let it out,” he counsels. “If not with me, then with somebody.”
It’s a potentially corny line delivered with finely tuned gentleness, which goes for much else here. Lynskey, so good at playing weary, careworn decency, makes heart-to-heart dialogue sound, well, actually from the heart, rather than mawkishly platitudinous; Sandler returns her sincerity with a lovely performance that captures the needy, girlish terror and exploratory adult curiosity at play in her character.
Her vocals, bright and plaintive and without musical-theater affectation, are exactly as imperfect as they need to be, though Hart gifts her with a full, climactically blossoming musical sequence at exactly the right moment, singing the signature Sara Bareilles ballad “She Used to Be Mine” — at which point any misty-eyed viewers who have barely been hanging on up to this point will likely take Buscemi’s advice. Commendably thoughtful and quietly humane for much of its running time, “Don’t Say Good Luck” also knows just when to let it out.
