‘The Baltimorons’ Review: Jay Duplass Returns with an Endearing, Bittersweet Christmas Eve Romance [B] | SXSW
The Baltimorons is Jay Duplass’ first original feature film in 14 years. One half of the American independent cinema duo heavyweights of the aughts and 2010s, The Duplass Brothers—completed by Mark Duplass—the last we heard from Jay in terms of a proper narrative film was 2011’s Jeff Who Lives at Home, co-directed with his brother. The time elapsed since Jay has held a sole director credit is even longer, dating back to his cult hit The Puffy Chair, which premiered at Sundance and screened at South by Southwest in 2005.
After a long stint executive producing films and directing television, Jay Duplass is back at the 2025 edition of SXSW with a movie that feels perfectly in step with his scrappy, mumblecore-adjacent bonafides. The Baltimorons feels like a relic of the indie film festival circuit from the era of The Puffy Chair: small, homespun, funny, heartfelt, and maybe just a little thin in terms of crafting a fully satisfying narrative arc. Regardless, there’s something admirably nostalgic about watching The Baltimorons—a sort of throwback to a time when indie cinema felt more DIY, unafraid to stumble in its pursuit of honest, relatable truths about characters just barely scraping by.
Cliff (co-writer with Duplass, Michael Strassner) is the quintessential example of such a character, a charming joker and former improv comedy performer with warm eyes and endearing smile who nonetheless struggles with his newfound sobriety—and tries to kill himself in the first minute of the movie. We catch up with Cliff on Christmas Eve, six months alcohol-free and heading to a family dinner with his fiancée, cheery and bantering but clearly smiling through some unresolved grief.
His life is about to get just a touch more inconvenient: a stray slip on the couple of stairs up into the house leaves him with a cracked tooth, and an emergency trip to the only dentist that would see him on the holiday, Didi (Liz Larsen), a middle-aged woman working through her own holiday gloom. From their first interaction—Cliff getting silly on nitrous to avoid the needle in his mouth—it’s clear the two might be exactly what the other needs to momentarily ease their respective aches.
What follows is a meandering Baltimore odyssey: a towed car, a lift to the impound lot, ditched reservations at a dive bar, crashing Didi’s ex-husband’s wedding reception, and on from there. The two ping-pong all around the city of Baltimore, the streets lit up with the ethereal glow of Christmas lights lovingly photographed by Jon Bregal’s distinctly filmic and fuzzy lens, lending a timeless quality to this tricky romance that treats Baltimore like a radiant city full of endless opportunities for misadventures.
How much you abide by this will-they-won’t-they fling will be entirely subjective, as we’re regularly reminded of the fact that Cliff has ditched out on his perpetually worrying fiancée on Christmas to flit around town with a woman he just met. It’s a credit to the performances of Strassner and Larson that their courtship reads as hesitantly charming as opposed to just irredeemable shittiness. The two have a winning banter with one another, and enough sadness within a stray gaze from each to realize their complicity in the fact that this is likely a bad idea. It’s as if they’re using this night as a last resort to desperately ward off the melancholy that exists on either side of it. It’s not that Cliff doesn’t love his fiancée, it’s that every facet of his life revolves around and is associated with his anguished emotional state. Didi represents some kind of relief from living with that every day, no matter how temporary or ill-advised––and vice versa for Didi and her constant window into the seemingly happy new marriage of her ex. Being the other woman is a small price to pay for a night off from the searing totality of what’s eating at her.
You’d be just as well to say these two people should be a little more mature and learn how to reckon with their problems like mature adults, but therein lies the complexity that steers The Baltimorons forward. Duplass and Strassner’s script has an evident love for these characters and an empathetic understanding of their respective plights, all the while in recognition that they’re hurting people around them. It’s a delicate line to walk, but this is a film that will please anyone that enjoys movies that don’t cast too much harsh judgment on their characters, instead examining them as multifaceted, flawed human beings––a method that should be familiar to fans of previous Duplass-related projects.
Like many Duplass films, The Baltimorons can feel emotionally lightweight, a bit shaggy, and more gently amusing than outright hilarious (something that will likely also remind viewers of the work of understated dramedy directors like Joe Swanberg). Emotional catharsis remains just out of reach, even in standout moments like Cliff’s impromptu improv performance with his estranged former peers—a scene brimming with unresolved tension that doesn’t fully carry through to the film’s closing beats.Yet, what the film lacks in narrative heft, it makes up for in sincerity and restrained naturalism. The Baltimorons doesn’t promise grand revelations or tidy resolutions. Instead, it offers a bittersweet reflection on how people navigate life’s struggles, finding solace in fleeting connections and shared joy. As Cliff tells Didi, shrugging off his troubles with a half-smile: “It’s kind of funny. You can laugh.”
Grade: B
This review is from the 2025 SXSW Film and Television Festival. The Baltimorons is currently seeing distribution.
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