The movie follows Los Angeles divorcée John who meets gorgeous and spirited Molly, the woman of his dreams. But when her son, Cyrus, enters the picture, things start to get messy.
Cyrus is not the jokey, polished production you would expect from its Hollywood cast and LA setting, but audiences who are comfortable with discomfort should find it "funny."
... A very fine comic-psychodrama that eschews prat falls and flippancy for a more intimately realist and considered rendering of manchild madness and its antecedents.
It offers you a look at a totally dysfunctional relationship that allows you to look at the relationships in your own life and breathe a sigh of relief.
Cyrus sounds like the sort of comedy in which people end up dropping buckets of paint on each other's heads, but the Duplasses treat the characters and their dilemma with utmost seriousness, a technique that gives the movie its uncomfortably comic vibe.
Simply by treating these characters as real, with all the uncertainty, emotional baggage and bad decisions that entails, the Duplasses expertly expose the hypocrisy of the airbrushed all-American ideal.
