Speaking as someone who has only recently cleared the threshold into thirty-somethingdom himself, I understand where The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something, a copy of which the folks out at Maverick Entertainment sent out for review, comes from. And there’s a pretty good chance that most of you–including you not quite thirtysomethings–will get it too.

The first couple of minutes of The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something actually manage to describe the plot pretty well, and so, I’ll quote them. “Ben Baker was a mediocre person at a mediocre job with mediocre friends who he wasn’t even sure he liked.” But the thing about Ben Baker is that he’s just about to turn thirty, and when that happens, a person generally tends to start looking back at their life up until then–a process which they really couldn’t do until then because they were largely too busy actually living it to even notice it had gone–and evaluating where they are against where they want to be. And more often than not, they’re not happy with the result. That will be the case with Ben Baker, and what he does following this realization is going to be…well…something to see.

A bit of background: this is actually directed and written by Larry Longstreth, whose work I’ve been watching since his animated shorts (Batman’s Gonna Get Shot In The Face is still easily one of the best DC pseudo-parodies I’ve seen in the last few years), so if you’ve been following along since the Bullcrank days, you’re going to be feeling this.

The newcomers, meanwhile, should be prepared for an adventure in the grandest Kevin Smith tradition, with all that that entails, including lengthy profanity-laced monologues at seemingly random intervals, and more than enough weed and ex-girlfriend jokes to choke an entire herd of horses.

Admittedly, I haven’t laughed like this since early Kevin Smith, which is, as we all know, better than later Kevin Smith in the same way that milk a day past its expiration date tastes vastly better than milk served chunk-style. The part where they show a LARP both as the characters see it and as how everyone else would see it is a sheer and unquestioned delight.

This is a conflict that most folks have likely had at some point, in which everything looks wrong. When acting like a grownup feels like an act, and doing what you always did feels less like a routine and more like a rut. The end result may not be as conclusive as one would like, but it’s authentic, realistic, and the exact kind of thing that we’ve all probably lived through.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this funny and thoroughly authentic portrayal of a man on the cusp of something a full ten out of ten. It’s entirely too good not to see, and should be required viewing for everyone between the ages of 25 and 35, or anyone who’s ever looked back on their life and asked the inevitable question: How the hell did I get here?.