The Baltimorons 2025 Movie Review
The commercial world seems to push holidays earlier and earlier these days. The kids are back at school, and the Halloween aisles in stores start popping up; these same aisles aren’t even cleared by the time the tinsel and baubles start appearing. So, although we’re getting more accustomed to thinking about Christmas before winter even really kicks in, September seems like a strange time for a Christmas movie to release, but somehow, director Jay Duplass makes it feel like a well-deserved treat. His latest effort, The Baltimorons, succeeds in doing what many more explicitly Christmas-themed movies fail at: capturing that crazy time of year when, at least in our most romantic imaginations, a single day can change lives. Not one snowflake falls in this movie, and yet it is easily the most compelling and truly spirited Christmas movie that we have had in years. And September seems as good a time as any to enjoy it.
Make no mistake: The Baltimorons has a dark edge to it. It opens with a failed suicide attempt, and the themes of suicide and addiction do run throughout the story, so this is worth bearing in mind if such subjects are upsetting to you. But this darkness serves a very real and admirable goal of delivering a truly lovable and relatable protagonist. Michael Strassner is Cliff, a still relatively young man caught at a crossroads in his life. The whole story of what has happened to him is gradually fed to us throughout the movie’s runtime, but what you need to know is that he is six months sober from alcohol and was formerly a member of Baltimore’s most prominent sketch and improv comedy troupe. Although an old friend keeps trying to tempt him into returning to the circuit, he resists, and his girlfriend (Olivia Luccardi) seems upset at the prospect of his going back to the comedy world.
It’s Christmas Eve, and the couple rock up to her parents’ house, only for Cliff to trip on the porch step and lose a tooth. He finds only one dentist open for business, and it’s Didi (Liz Larsen), a no-nonsense, straight-talking woman perhaps two decades his senior. He overhears a conversation between her and her daughter in which she is unexpectedly left alone on Christmas and, feeling bad for her, convinces her to spend the day with him. Yes, it’s one of those classic rom-com setups in which people go from strangers to lovers within a matter of hours, and this can be a difficult thing to pull off without falling into saccharine, cheesy, or downright contrived territory. But The Baltimorons has so much about it that distinguishes it from your average rom-com, or your average Christmas movie, that even someone usually averse to such mushy stories like yours truly grew to love it, and to find a surprising amount of charm, wisdom, and relief in it.
Age-gap romances are not a traditionally well-explored subject in mainstream cinema. When movies go there, it is often either through the lens of fantasy or predation. Being romantically linked with someone much older or younger is either meant to be creepy or really hot, and movies rarely care to consider what such dynamics look like in real life. It is much to the credit of Duplass and writer/star Strassner that they cared to consider this. The movie could basically have played out just the same had Cliff had his tooth fixed by a hot, 30-something dentist instead, but by daring to widen the divide between its two leads in such a significant way, it allows a certain humanity and vulnerability to seep into the story. They shed the conventional notions of sexual attraction to give us a story about two people so real you may well know them yourself.
Cliff is a tall, portly, bearded guy with that classic bumbling comedian energy about him. Didi is a sharp, diminutive professional who — yes — is probably old enough to be his mother. And yet, because of the heartfelt ways in which they begin to relate to each other over the course of the day, what starts as a short-lived professional meeting spins out into an unlikely love story in which two people, somewhat lost in the meaning of life, cross paths and experience a sort of happiness they haven’t felt in a long time. The warm writing, direction, and beautiful chemistry between Strassner and Larsen combine to deliver a romantic connection with a sincerity most movies wouldn’t dream of giving us. Perhaps this is what makes it such a successful Christmas movie — it is just bursting with heart and humanity and real, honest-to-God feeling. It doesn’t need to end with everybody sitting around a turkey with paper hats on, because through its characters, it captures that purity of spirit that tradition dictates the holiday season is all about.
While it is probably most easily categorized as a rom-com, there is a more prevalent sense of the drama genre than anything else with The Baltimorons. It is not built with the express purpose of making you laugh, or of seeing two people fall in love, but of tapping into the human experience, with all its heartache, injustice, failure, and senselessness. Despite the opening scene of the suicide attempt, it doesn’t start on a particularly miserable note. Things aren’t awful for Cliff, they’re just… unfulfilled? There is just something not quite working for him, which he later comes to realize and admit to. He’s a man for whom life has not gone in the direction he had hoped, and he feels kind of stuck. Then a series of random accidents led him to meet a woman who feels quite similarly, although for different reasons. As the movie goes on, Cliff and Didi grow on us as an audience the way they do on each other, and there is such a delightful warmth between them that offers a sense of reassurance in an otherwise indecipherable world.
I was surprised by how effectively this movie spoke to me. Perhaps it’s because I, too, have found myself at one of those weird crossroads in life, and that in such instances, being reminded that there is good in the world and opportunities to find happiness is a real comfort. There is a really touching scene towards the end of the movie in which Cliff and his exasperated girlfriend talk things out, and consider how much everything has changed for both of them, and rather than it being a big blow-up, it is the catharsis they both need to move on to the next stages in their lives. They cry, and hug, and although it is the culmination of much tension, it feels like a blessed relief in which they are just two people, just shaking their heads and laughing at the craziness of life.
The Baltimorons feels like a real breakout for its lead stars, and thank God for them. They are the unlikely coupling that we didn’t realize we needed until they came along. I would really love to see more movies with this much heart and character, that care to just take 90 minutes to feel human feelings. Strassner and Larsen are an absolute delight to watch, and this is the kind of movie that indie cinema is all about. It’s never going to make a billion dollars, and probably won’t garner enough attention to win any notable awards, but in an hour and a half, it made me think, and feel, and gave me comfort in uncertain times. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s art.
