The number one thing I left Hot Tub Time Machine thinking was that the movie could not have existed without John Cusack in it. He plays a 40-something who doesn’t quite know where his life is headed after a break-up with his girlfriend, and wonders what might have happened if things had gone differently in his romantic life. The layers of back-referencing that took into account the audience’s own previous relationship with Lloyd Dobler, with Lane Meyer, with Harry the young hobo, and our awareness that the man who was all these things is older now, made it a film about all of us trying to come to terms with our new, unexpected adulthood. It made it, momentarily, more than a cheap - or, at $12.50 a pop, not-so-cheap - bro-flick comedy. (To be perfectly honest, while it was funny, there weren’t ENOUGH laughs.)

In the dark movie theater, I wrote down one of Cusack’s lines in my notebook:

We were young. We had momentum. We were winning.

If that isn’t Lloyd Dobler all grown up then I don’t even know what is.