Youth only happens once. Sometimes directors in their films deliberately do not specify the time date, forcing the viewer to determine it at his own discretion. So, the near future. Humanity has mastered sublight speeds and easily sends ships on long expeditions. A breakthrough in space has had no impact on life on Earth, so it looks like the 21st century. People still go to work for a salary. Politicians still tell voters beautiful phrases, hoping to rise higher and occupy a larger cabinet. At the center of the story is professional politician Jack (Todd Grinnell), leading the election race for governor of the state. One rash phrase at the next rally throws him into the outsiders of the race, after which he decides to take “time out”, and goes with his wife Maggie (Cadi Strickland) to the house of his father who died some time ago.
Arriving at his childhood home, the politician unexpectedly encounters a girl from his youth, who has not changed at all in the past 20 years! Jack's childhood friend Patrick (Baron Vaughn) tells the story of Alice (Brianna Hildebrand) returning to Earth. For 10 years, the colonists were on board the ship in a state of hibernation. Arriving at the destination, it turned out that the colony is ready to take only part of the arrivals! The rest were sent back to Earth. Another 10 years of sleep, and Alice and her father find themselves in their hometown, where they were physically absent for 20 long years, and according to internal sensations – only a couple of months. This is a slightly expanded synopsis for the film. Ironically about the very strange “colonization” of the “distant planets” do not want, because in this case the effect of time extension is just a technique to place the main characters in the necessary framework.
The movie doesn’t have a slogan, but I would say, ‘We all come from Childhood.’ That's right, capitalized, because the older we get, the more appealing that happy, carefree time is in our memories. If by the seventeenth spring you also had a great feeling, then... Our mind, strange as it may sound, does not like to linger long in the present, constantly regretting the past, which can never change, or anxiously waiting for the future, which may never come, because the "echo" of the past and the "anticipation" of the future delay every fleeting moment of the "now." Jack is not in a hurry to plunge into such wilds of psychoanalysis, but a meeting with Alice seems to throw him back in time 20 years ago, forcing him to look at himself today through the eyes of the young man Jack, with whom Alice broke up just a few months ago.
Alice hardly gets used to the new world, and Jack for her in such a difficult situation is not so much an adult young man to whom she wrote letters very recently, but a vital point of support in new realities. In a surprising way, the seemingly long-burnt-out feeling for Alice flares up again in Jack’s soul, forcing him to do things that were completely impossible for him a couple of days ago. He rethinks his whole life, and comes to the disappointing conclusion: this can not continue. Realizing that 20 years is too big a difference for lovers who met their seventeen-year-olds together, he makes an unexpected decision for the viewer, which adds a full-fledged score to the film, because "youth is happy already that it has a future!"