Evelyn’s teenage son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is awkward and arrogant (a terrible combo, though not that uncommon). He has no friends and lives for his social media channel, where he performs songs live in front of audiences around the world. He keeps track of the number of subscribers and upvotes and likes, throwing them in the face of anyone who dares not to take him seriously. His parents, played by Moore and the wonderful J.O. Sanders, are intellectuals with easily mocked pretensions. Ziggy’s father asks his son about the music he writes, barely waiting for an answer before warning him not to play “rhythm and blues” because “Amiri Baraka was very clear about that.” Ziggy doesn’t know who Amiri Baraka is and he doesn’t care. Evelyn wonders what happened to her little “ally” son, the kid she used to lead on marches and sing protest songs on her little plastic guitar. Ziggy treats her with open contempt. She puts up with it and cries in the car while driving to work.
A little of that goes a long way, and there’s a lot of that in When You’re Done Saving the World. When Ziggy develops a crush on Lila (Alicia Bowe), a politically minded girl at school, he decides to “become a politician” in order to impress her or at least be able to keep the conversation going with her. Lila is surprisingly tolerant of this strange kid who follows her around, trying to “get political” with her. Meanwhile, Evelyn redirects her thwarted motherly love to Kyle (Billy Bryke), who has recently moved into the shelter with his mother. Kyle is good kid, polite and responsible, everything Ziggy is not. Kyle works at a car dealership and likes it, but Evelyn can’t hide her liberal-sassy middle-class horror at the job and starts babbling about how maybe he can get a scholarship to Oberlin, even though he clearly doesn’t want it. What’s wrong with working on cars, Evelyn? Evelyn’s blind spot again. She thinks it would be a “waste.” Her demeanor becomes downright creepy, just as Ziggy’s behavior towards Lila borders on the sinister.
The whole movie is about projecting your own needs onto other people, seeing in them what you want to see, or seeing in them a distorted mirror of your own hopes for yourself – an ideal war with reality. Evelyn cares for the abused women in the shelter, but cannot speak to them without condescension. She works to help others, but she can’t connect with her son. Ziggy says he wants to learn about politics, but only to profit from it on his live stream. He has a platform. He could save the world!
Is this satire? It’s hard to say. The characters are broadly drawn and mostly broadly acted, so much so that the film plays like a skit about no-nonsense liberal do-gooders. Leela and Kyle are the only characters who seem connected to the world and themselves. Their confused, almost embarrassed responses when dealing with Ziggy and Evelyn’s projections onto them are understandable.
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