Maia Mitchell, left, and Camila Morrone in Never Goin’ Back (A24)

This is the first feature film by writer-director Augustine Frizzell, a partly autobiographical tale of two teenage girls trying to make it out of their humdrum suburban Dallas hometown. Angela (The Fosters’ Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Camila Morrone from Death Wish) share a room in a low-rent house with Jessie’s brother, Dustin (Joel Allen), a wannabe drug dealer, and the creepy Brandon (Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney), who incessantly propositions the girls for a three-way.

Angela has used the rent money for her and Jessie to stay at a beach house on the Gulf, even though (so they complain) it’s in Galveston. Now the girls have to pick up extra shifts at the pancake house where they work so they can make rent, which is easier said than done, because their jobs suck, and if they show up to one more shift noticeably stoned or drunk, the stuck-up hostess is going to get them fired. Aside from that, there are hijinks with Jessie’s brother and his group of dimwitted friends, all trying to start dealing weed. Their debacles and the girls’ plight crisscross over the course of a few days.

Never Goin’ Back is a lot like Greg Mottola’s Superbad and Kevin Smith’s early films, Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy, although Frizzell’s dialogue comes nowhere near the wit of those other films. In fact, despite the seemingly obligatory laughs from the bawdy jokes and gross-out gags, there just isn’t enough of a core to these characters and their story to make them root-worthy. Angela and Jessie are totally self-obsessed slackers with no goals in life whatsoever. Their personalities are pretty blank, and it’s actually difficult to distinguish one from the other. It’s not like a traditional comedy duo where one is the zany risk-taker and the other is the straight man (or girl). No, Angela and Jessie practically share a brain and a personhood. I couldn’t even remember their names until I read the press kit.

I didn’t hate this movie, but I had a lot of trouble liking it. There just wasn’t any there there, besides the MacGuffin of the trip to Galveston. The film kind of gets itself together and delivers some decent laughs in the big climax, which involves one of the entitled deadbeats pooping in a bucket and the other vomiting on a senior citizen, but by that point I had checked out.