Evelyn's teenage son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) awkward and arrogant (a terrible combination, though not out of the ordinary). He has no friends, and lives on his social media channel, where he performs songs via livestreams to a global audience. It keeps track of subscribers, upvotes, and likes, and throws it in the face of anyone who dares not take it seriously. His parents are played by Moore and The Wonderful Jay O SandersThey are intellectuals with claims that can easily be mocked. Ziggy's father asks his son what music he's writing, and he barely waits for an answer before warning him not to play "rhythm and blues" because "Amiri Baraka He was quite clear about this. Ziggy doesn't know who Amiri Baraka is and doesn't care. Evelyn wonders what happened to her little son 'Ally', the child she marched to, and who used to sing songs of protest over his little plastic guitar. Ziggy treats her with open contempt, tolerates him, and weeps. In the car as she drives to work.
A little bit of that goes a long way, and there's a lot of it in When You're Done Saving the World. When Ziggy develops a crush on Lila (Alisha Boy), a politically minded girl at school, he decides to "go political" in order to impress her, or at least be able to keep up with her. Lila is amazingly tolerant of this weird kid who follows her around, trying to "get political" with her. Meanwhile, Evelyn redirects her mother's thwarted love for Kyle (Billy Break), who recently moved into the shelter with his mother. Kyle is a good kid, polite, and responsible, everything Ziggy isn't. Kyle works in a beauty shop, and he enjoys it, but Evelyn can't hide her smug, liberal, middle-class horror at the job and starts blabbing about how he could get him a scholarship to Oberlin, even though he clearly doesn't. t do not want it. What's wrong with working on cars, Evelyn? Evelyn's blind spot again. She thinks it would be a "waste". Her behavior tends to be quite creepy, just like Ziggy's behavior towards creepy Lila borders on.
The whole movie is about projecting your own needs onto others, seeing what you want to see in them, or seeing a skewed mirror of your own hopes for yourself - like a war with reality. Evelyn takes an interest in the battered women at the shelter but cannot speak to them without condescension. She works to help others but cannot communicate with her son. Ziggy says he wants to learn about the politics, but only to benefit from it on the live stream. He has a platform. He can save the world!
Is this satire? It's hard to say. The characters are broadly drawn and mostly broadly played, so much so that the movie plays like a skit about ignorant liberals doing good. Lila and Kyle are the only two characters who seem connected to the world and to themselves. Their bewildered, almost embarrassed responses when dealing with Ziggy and Evelyn's expectations of them are understandable.
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