On Movies: The real Philly couple behind 'Slow Learners'

Actors aren't the only ones who get typecast.

Just ask Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, principals behind a string of successful, powerful, provocative documentaries - The Art of the Steal, Last Days Here, The Atomic States of America, and Rock School among them. The duo, partners in work and in life and long-time Philadelphians, had been itching to try something different, something with a screenplay and stars attached.

Not so fast.

"It's really hard to get opportunities in that world when you've been branded a documentary filmmaker," says Joyce, who grew up in Delaware County. "It's very easy to be dismissed, for someone to say, 'Yeah, you make a great documentary, but I don't know if you can direct actors.'

"And Don and I would always say, 'You know, when we start a film and we go into someone's house, you're meeting the subjects for the first time and you've got to make them feel comfortable and gain their trust and get what you need for your interview. . . . That's another way of directing people.' "

Argott and Joyce finally made their case. Slow Learners, a rom-com starring Adam Pally (The Mindy Project) and Sarah Burns (I Love You, Man), co-directed by the Center City pair, opened at the PFS Roxy on Friday. Their inaugural narrative feature premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, bowed in New York this month, and will roll out to other theaters - including the Bryn Mawr Film Institute - in coming weeks. The film, whose producers include Tommy Joyner and Jamie Lokoff of MilkBoy Studios in Philadelphia, is available on VOD platforms, too.

Shot in and around Media, Slow Learners is about platonic best friends, colleagues at a high school (he's a guidance counselor, she's a librarian) who decide they don't want to be dorky losers anymore. They spend their summer break recasting themselves as hip, happening hedonists, only to discover that sloppy sex and boozy excess aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Could it be the friends are heading for a realization? That all the time they've wasted, all the humiliation they've suffered have blinded them to the meaningful companionship that has been right in front of them all along?

It turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Argott and Joyce, who were good friends for "three or four years" before they moved in together. Maeve, their soon-to-be-2-year-old daughter, makes her screen debut in the film.

"It was one of those things where every time we hung out, we always had a great time," says Argott, looking over to Joyce on the deck of their apartment near Rittenhouse Square - an apartment they also share with five cats.

"There was immediate chemistry. We were always laughing. I was in a relationship that wasn't really working, and I started hanging out with Sheena a lot more, and one day we looked at each other and it was like, 'What are we doing?' "

Needless to say, they recognized something in the story of Slow Learner's Jeff and Anne.

"You always look for things to connect to," Joyce says. "And that was very easy to connect to. I find a lot of myself in Anne, although I wouldn't go so far as to say I wear cat sweaters."

"There's nothing that I connect to with Jeff," says Argott, with a knowing guffaw.

Along with Pally and Burns, Slow Learners boasts a formidable team of comedic talents who honed their skills at improv hubs such as the Upright Citizens Brigade and the Groundlings: Reid Scott, Catherine Reitman, Gil Ozeri, and Saturday Night Live cast members Bobby Moynihan and Cecily Strong - not a shabby lineup, and Argott and Joyce were keen to let them loose.

A good three-fourths of the dialogue, say the co-directors, was improvised by the cast.

"We went through the script and we just laid out the bare bones," Joyce says. " 'Here are the beats that we need to hit, here's what this scene needs to do, just get us from point A to point B.'

"You get a more genuine performance when they're truly making it their own," she adds. "And all of the cast had such amazing improvisational skills that it would have been a crime to not utilize that."

Says Argott: "It's like if you got Jimi Hendrix and you said, 'Just play that rhythm. Just play those three chords, dude.' Why would you do that? You've got Jimi Hendrix there!"

Argott and Joyce cite the work of Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Paul Feig, and the classics of the John Hughes' canon as key influences and inspirations as they set out to make a comedy.

"Those are our go-to's," Joyce says.

"Making documentary films, we deal with tough subjects - and we would have dark days. And when you come home at night, you don't want to watch more dark stuff. So I'd rather put Stepbrothers on, or flip through the channels and The 40-Year-Old Virgin is on. It's comfort food.

"And we want to make that kind of comfort food for the screen as well."

215-854-5629@Steven_Rea