The inability of guys in their 30s to grow up and live adult lives is far and away the most persistent GenX theme in movies today. David Munro‘s Full Grown Men, which played Friday night and Saturday afternoon at the AFI Film Festival, is another in this vein. A guy named Alby (Matt McGrath ) decides he can’t hack being a husband and a father and decides to hook up with his his best friend from childhood and a few others in the same boat, etc.

Sarah Rafferty, Francesca Faridany, Matt McGrath at the Full Grown Men after-party — Friday, 11.4.06, 12:15 am

I’ve never been much for extended adolesence, but I can say without qualification that I loved the Full Grown Men after-party that began late Friday night. Free drinks and food, good people to talk to. If you insist upon hearing an opinion of the film, consider the words of the great F.X. Feeney: “It’s a very funny, very tough-minded film about the need to grow up…as entertaining as the wine tour in Sideways and lyrical throughout, with a strong ‘sense of place’, particularly about the American dreamland that is Florida.”
I ran into McGrath early on and took his picture. He’s been making films since he was in his late teens — Ironweed, Bob Roberts, The Impostors, Boys Don’t Cry, The Broken Hearts Club, The Anniversary Party, The Notorious Bettie Page. His New York stage work has brought a lot of good attention also — Cabaret, Distant Fires (for which he won an LA Weekly Award) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
The latter performance inspired the New York Times wrote that Matt brought “a slow hand to his delivery with droll, molasses-paced double takes to match. And even more than [the role’s originator], he finds a startling individuality in the different voices within Hedwig.”
I don’t know what I’m doing or saying, but McGrath is a good actor with a likable personality. Not that we talked for very long. The highlight of the evening came when I ordered a skirt steak. I spoke mainly with the film’s publicist Mickey Cottrell; the dominant topic was his new Blackberry Pearl.