'Momma's Man' star goes home again

On being a young adult, ''Momma's Man'' star Matt Boren says, ''I just think it's really hard today because the world is faster and bigger and a bit more challenging.'' (wiqan ang for the Boston Globe)

FRAMINGHAM - The neighborhood was the same quiet place he remembered, and the house was the same size and color - but then there was this big boat in the driveway.

"The whole place looks different," said Matt Boren as he drove by his old home for the first time in a decade. "I used to dream about getting out of Framingham when I was a kid, and now I sort of dream about being back."

Nostalgia for returning home after years of struggling to come to grips with getting older is a central theme in the 32-year-old actor's latest effort and first feature-length film, "Momma's Man," which opened Friday at Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge.

The movie, which has received strong reviews since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, focuses on Boren's character, Mikey, who retreats inside memories of his adolescence during a visit with his parents on his way back from a business trip. Instead of continuing on to his wife and young child in California, Mikey becomes emotionally unable to leave his childhood home, making excuses to stay, regressing to his youth, and ignoring phone calls from his wife.

Dealing with the tug between the safety of youth and the realities of adulthood is something many young adults are struggling with now, Boren said.

"It's generational, and it's very tricky, because we hold our parents in such high-esteem," he said while sitting on a metal bench outside the Brophy Elementary School he attended. "I just think it's really hard today because the world is faster and bigger and a bit more challenging."

"Momma's Man" writer-director Azazel Jacobs, son of renowned avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, cast his own parents in the film and shot most of the scenes in their TriBeCa apartment where he grew up. But Boren said he didn't set out to imitate the son.

"We made a pact before we started shooting that I was not playing him," Boren said. "I watched his movements in the apartment, but other than that, this character was the very opposite of him."

The clearest distinction: "Azazel has a Clash tattoo and long wild hair and a noise ring and he's an artist, and this character, Mikey, is crunching numbers at a computer somewhere," he said. "We just decided to go as far off as we could."

Boren, who studied dramatic writing at New York University's celebrated Tisch School of the Arts, has embraced a similar nostalgia for home in his own work. In 2005 he produced his first TV pilot, "Dirtbags," a Melissa Joan Hart-led comedy about a group of 20-something friends growing up in Framingham. He now plays a recurring role as Stuart on the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," and his play "Camel Lot," which takes place in the parking lot of the Brophy school, debuted in Los Angeles last year and is in the process of being adapted for the big screen.

"Matt draws so much on our childhood and growing up where we did," said his brother, David, in a phone interview. "I think he looks to a lot of the experiences that we had and a lot of the people we grew up with as inspiration for things that he's been doing, either as a writer or an actor."

During filming for "Momma's Man" last year, Boren moved back in with his parents, who relocated from Framingham to New York City's West Village neighborhood when he was in college. It wasn't dire financial straits that brought him back under their roof, but a chance to get in character for filming with Ken and Flo Jacobs.

"Every morning I would wake up at 5 o'clock, catch a subway down to TriBeCa and head to Azazel's parents' apartment," Boren recalled, running through what became a daily routine for almost three weeks.

"I would get into Azazel's bed in his bedroom, he'd hand me a mug of coffee and I'd shoot the day with his parents. Then I'd take the train back to my parents' apartment and there would be a sticky note on the counter that said, 'Love you babe, there's food in the kitchen if you want it.' "

Moving in with parents 10 years after he had moved out was "surreal," he said, and doing so while filming "Momma's Man," "the whole thing was just like mirroring each other."

Boren, whose sitcom credentials include a 2000 spot on "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," is "one of those guys that you don't know what to do with until you see someone using home so effectively, and then he becomes the kind of archetype," said Josh Radnor, who stars as Ted in "How I Met Your Mother."

"He almost has to create the thing for himself, or somebody has to know how to use him," Radnor said in a phone interview, "but Matt Boren well-used is as good as anyone you'll find."