Two 14-year-olds bet a college fund on the snack stand at their town pool. Adam Carter Rehmeier ran that same stand as a teenager in Nebraska City, and Snack Shack turns the memory into a comedy about a friendship that one summer puts to the test.

Snack Shack is a coming-of-age comedy written and directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier, and its premise comes straight from his own adolescence. As a teenager in the early 1990s he worked the snack shack at the Steinhart Park pool in Nebraska City, the small Missouri River town where he grew up. Three decades later he went back to shoot a film about two boys who run that stand for one summer, with Conor Sherry and Gabriel LaBelle as the friends and Mika Abdalla as the newcomer who unsettles them.

The story is set in 1991. A.J. Carter, played by Sherry, and Moose Miller, played by LaBelle, are 14 and already think of themselves as businessmen. They bet on dog races and brew their own beer to sell to classmates at parties, until their parents discover the operation and shut it down. Shane Workman, an older friend back from the Gulf War who now works as a lifeguard at the community pool, tells them the pool’s snack shack is up for summer rental. The boys go to a city council auction and overbid for it, paying with money from A.J.’s college savings.

That decision gives the film its stakes. A.J.’s parents, his father, the Judge, and his mother, Jean, are not impressed by how their son has spent the money, and A.J. promises to pay it back from the stand’s takings. On its first day the shack brings in more than $1,600. The plan works, at least on paper, and for a few weeks the summer seems to belong to them.

Then Brooke moves in next door to A.J. She is the daughter of a military man and will stay in town only until her father is reassigned. She takes a job as a lifeguard at the pool, has a habit of photographing the people around her and teases A.J. about his allergies. Both boys fall for her. Moose, the more aggressive of the two, asks her out first, and the friendship that survived every scheme starts to crack. Meanwhile the pair keep running into Randy and Rodney Carmichael, two steroid-using wrestler brothers played by Michael Bonini and Christian James, who make a habit of bullying them.

A director who went home to shoot his own summer

Rehmeier did not make Snack Shack from memory alone. Filming took six weeks, starting on 25 July 2022 in Nebraska City itself, and the whole shoot stayed inside Nebraska. The production received a $200,000 grant from the state government, used the town’s Pioneer 3 Theater as a location and travelled to Omaha for scenes at the Henry Doorly Zoo and at Horsemen’s Park, a racetrack the film renames Statesman’s. At its peak the production employed around 65 cast and crew members, with extras hired from the area.

The autobiographical thread runs further than the snack stand. Rehmeier’s father is a retired district judge, Randall Rehmeier, and A.J.’s father in the film is called simply the Judge. That does not turn the film into a memoir: it is loosely based on the director’s youth rather than a record of it. But it anchors Snack Shack in a real town of a little over 7,000 people, far from the suburban settings that most American teen comedies use.

The budget was around $4.5 million. MRC financed the film with T-Street and Paperclip Limited, the production company of Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson, and Jordan Foley produced. Behind the camera, Rehmeier worked with cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier and editor Justin Krohn. The score is by Keegan DeWitt, lead singer of the indie band Wild Cub and the composer of Cold Weather, Morris from America and Hearts Beat Loud.

From The Bunny Game to a summer comedy

For Rehmeier, Snack Shack is a sharp turn. He studied film at Columbia College Chicago with a focus on cinematography, worked as a documentary camera operator and spent years shooting low-budget features. His first film as director, The Bunny Game, co-directed with the actress Rodleen Getsic, was an extreme black-and-white horror film shot in 13 days for $13,000, and the British Board of Film Classification refused to certify it. He followed it with Jonas, a parable in six parts about a man who washes up on the California coast.

The change came with Dinner in America, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. The film follows a relationship between a neurodivergent young woman, played by Emily Skeggs, and an anarchist punk, played by Kyle Gallner. Its release during the pandemic left it with a small audience, until it caught on through TikTok and returned to cinemas in 2024. John Waters had already named it among his favourite films of 2022.

Next to that film, Snack Shack is a step toward the mainstream: a period comedy distributed by a major studio, with a young cast already on the rise. It keeps Rehmeier’s interest in misfits and in small Midwestern places, and swaps punk rock for the summer job. His next film as director, Carolina Caroline, is listed for 2026.

A cast caught between breakouts

The casting gives the film an unusual timeline. Gabriel LaBelle signed on in 2022, while he was making The Fabelmans for Steven Spielberg, in which he plays Sammy Fabelman, the director’s stand-in. That role won him the Critics’ Choice award for best young performer more than a year before Snack Shack reached cinemas, so audiences met him first as a camera-obsessed teenager in Spielberg’s film and only later as Moose, the louder half of this duo.

Conor Sherry came from a different direction. He was a sociology student at UCLA whose main screen credit was a recurring role in The Terminal List, and he won the part with a self-taped audition recorded in a hotel room while he was isolating with COVID-19. Snack Shack was his first lead role in a feature film. He went on to appear in Happy Gilmore 2.

Mika Abdalla had been acting since childhood, from Barney & Friends to the Netflix series Project Mc² and the Hulu teen comedy Sex Appeal, and she has said that Brooke is the character closest to herself that she has played. In 2026 she starred in the Prime Video series Off Campus. Nick Robinson, who plays Shane, brings a coming-of-age history of his own, from The Kings of Summer to Love, Simon. David Costabile, the Gale Boetticher of Breaking Bad and the Wags of Billions, plays the Judge, and Gillian Vigman plays Jean.

An old genre moved to a river town

The teen summer comedy is an old American form, and Snack Shack does not hide its lineage. Two boys, one girl and one summer recall Stand by Me and Superbad, and the presence of Robinson points straight back to The Kings of Summer. What the film adds is place and period: a public pool in a river town in 1991, a city council auction, a summer job that is also a business gamble with someone else’s college fund.

That is also where its limits are drawn. The rivalry between two friends over the same girl is one of the oldest templates in the genre, and the film follows it without disguise. In its final stretch the story turns toward a loss that changes the summer for everyone, a shift in tone that split opinion when the film came out. We will not spell it out here.

The question the film holds open is a simple one: can a friendship built on shared schemes survive the first thing the two friends cannot split down the middle? Brooke is the obvious answer, but the money, the debt to A.J.’s parents and the stand itself all test the same partnership, and Shane, the one adult-sized friend they have, sits at the centre of it.

Commercially, Snack Shack stayed small. Republic Pictures, a Paramount label, gave it a limited release in the United States on 15 March 2024, two days after a premiere in Nebraska City. Paramount had acquired the film before the 2023 Hollywood strikes pushed its release back. It runs 112 minutes and took around $455,000 at the US box office.

That leaves Snack Shack as a small film with a precise address. Rehmeier spent the first part of his career on films most audiences would never choose to see. Here he went back to the pool where he worked as a teenager and built a comedy around the money, the girl and the friend he nearly lost. Whether that summer means anything to someone who never worked a pool snack stand is the bet the film makes, and it is as reckless as the one A.J. and Moose place at the auction.