Summer Days, Summer Nights is the loosely intertwined story of three young couples in a Long Island shore town in 1982.  As the temperatures rise, so does the passion, but all good things must come to an end.  As Labor Day weekend draws near, the lovers must determine if their feelings are real or if what they had was just a summer fling. 

The tangled narrative reeks of sweat and SPF as it bounces between needle drops of your favorite 80’s hits.  Coupled with a large cast that does their best with an uninspired script, it is a good enough hang, but like the summer flings that fill the narrative, it is quickly forgotten.  The script is so riddled with clichés that there is no specificity to any of the storylines.  Further, the structure of the script favors a telling instead of showing approach and the cast often find themselves reacting to events that were glossed over in the act breaks or explaining to the audience everything we missed. 

JJ Flynn (Pico Alexander) is the one exception in the cast that he actually gets to make some decisions on screen towards the end of the film and we get to see him work through it all.  It makes sense as JJ is far and away the main entry point into this ensemble piece, and thankfully Alexander is an amicable young talent that helps to keep us involved.   

Summer Days, Summer Nights was written, directed, and features Edward Burns in a supporting role.  With most of his writing and directing credits in the romantic comedy genre, he does handle the different romantic storylines well, but his ensemble management suffers.  The couples all flow through the same peaks and valleys at the same rate which makes the 108-minute film feel much longer due to the repeated arcs.  

By and large, the characters are all very one note at best.  The boys fill the standard lineup of romantic comedy staples – Terry the Hippie (Amadeus Serafini), Frankie the Old Flame (Anthony Ramos), Mello the Frat Boy (Jon Rudnitsky), and JJ the wide-eyed innocent one – but opposite them, the girls (Lindsey Morgan, Caitlin Stasey, and Rita Volk) are just passively bouncing along in their bikinis waiting for the boys to fall in love with them.  They are not given any real depth or identity which ultimately hurts the film because they carry half the narrative yet have no real story telling agency. 

Look at, for example, Volk’s character Winky.  Of the girls, she is the only one that the script comes close to letting us see her decide whether to pursue her relationship into the autumn months, but it’s done in the blink of an eye.  Whereas Alexander gets to show us JJ grappling with the pros and cons of his dilemma, and we get to see it play out on screen, Volk goes through her decision making all internally and we are refused the scenes where she is weighing the consequences of her options.  It is even less so for Stasey’s Suzy whose arc leads to an interesting climax, but then is processed and resolved off screen. 

The world they inhabit brings back warm summer memories, but again only in the most basic sense.  Outside of the accents and a few passing references to being on Long Island, it feels like any generic shore town without a true identity for itself.  Worse yet, the town appears to be in a vacuum absent of any people that are not one of the couples.  With the exception of the Memorial Day Block Party and the Fourth of July Concert, we hardly see anyone else exist in this world.  The addition of a reoccurring nosey neighbor or beach patron that JJ would interact with at the cabana would go a long way in opening the world of the film and make it feel a little bit more lived in and real.   

When the summer ends and the credits roll, all the plot lines are tied up neatly enough to satisfy.  It is a harmless release that doesn’t have much to say even within the context of a feel-good romantic comedy.  It revels in its genericness in hopes that we can find some aspect of it to relate to our own lives.  That being said, you would be hard pressed to find much to relate to in this rather bland paint by numbers idea of what a summer romance – or any relationship for that matter – actually entails.