Joe List, who co-wrote the screenplay, stars as Jeff. He lives in New York City, has been in recovery for a few years, is in a stable relationship with his girlfriend Beth (Sarah Tollemache, List’s real life partner) and has gotten to a point where he feels confident enough to deal with it start mentoring other people recovery. But he keeps having nightmares in which he hits pedestrians with his car, causing them to flee before he can find out who they are or how badly they were injured. Louis CK plays the therapist that Joe tells about this dream. (Make it what you will.) Jeff doesn’t like to talk about his family. And he specifically refuses to talk about his mother. The subject of his upbringing is a minefield he dares not step on.
The film takes its time getting to the point where Jeff is chasing his personal catharsis by driving to his hometown in rural Maine to meet his father (Robert Walsh), mother (Paula Plum) and extended family (zu to which Nick Di Paolo belongs as an uncle) and Richard O’Rourke as Jeff’s grandfather). They’re a bunch of reactionaries who greet Jeff’s arrival with a burst of casual homophobia and other bigoted sentiments. Jeff is deeply uncomfortable in their presence, as he should be, but he nonetheless feels compelled to confront them and compel them to investigate their role in damaging his psyche.
But by this point in the film, we may have given up hope of seeing a family story told with insight, wit, and originality. CK and List spend forever and a day doing little vignettes about Jeff’s life with Beth (which is boring) and his recovery group, and there are scenes exploring his work as a live musician that don’t add anything to our understanding of the characters (although it is nice to see live jazz performed extensively on screen, even if the piano fake is obvious).
Once Jeff hits the state, the listless self-indulgence of filmmaking continues, with the filmmakers indulging in pointlessly fussy cutaway editing (particularly during piano scenes) and expressionistic lighting (green means fear or something). These and other filmmaking tools (including the widescreens) seem intended to enrich a thin story that clearly meant a lot to the people who wrote it. But the grand total of “Fourth of July” has the same effect on the viewer as being trapped at a party with a nice but boring person who decides to tell you their entire life story without even asking your name .