Anthony Lane: "The Kings of Summer" and "Fast & Furious 6" Reviews: The New Yorker How long does it take to build a house? Thoreau was specific on the matter. He went down to the woods with an axe in late March, 1845; raised the frame at the start of May; and first occupied his dwelling place on the Fourth of July, which seems only right. The whole thing cost him just over twenty-eight dollars, though one marvels less at the economy than at the speed. All the more amazing, then, that a trio of useless teen-agers, in "The Kings of Summer," get their house up and running in under a month. It is made from odds and ends, with a front door borrowed from a portable toilet. The movie's director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, has no interest in the Thoreau-like niceties of construction; most of it is done as a montage, to music, in a scruffy modern echo of the barn-raising sequence from "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954). Mind you, the real joy of that scene was that Howard Keel and the other fellows found time for a merry brawl, destroying what they had created in five minutes flat. What glues "The Kings of Summer," a slim and wistful independent picture, to an old chest-thumper from the glory days of M-G-M is the wish to waive practicality for the sake of an idea - the dream, undetailed and irresistible, of forging a fresh green life. The original title of Vogt-Roberts's film was "Toy's House," and it should have stayed that way. Joe Toy (Nick Robinson), a comely youth of fifteen, stumbles on his new habitation when, drifting off from a party, on the edge of his small Ohio town, he enters a forest glade. The air of unreality - of life held in moonlit suspension - is extreme, and we half expect Joe to wake up the next morning wearing the head of an ass. Instead, he recruits his best friend, Patrick (Gabriel Basso), plus a third kid named Biaggio (Moises Arias), who somehow resembles both Gollum and Frodo, to flee their respective families and go back to nature. Correction: halfway back to nature. After a failed attempt to trap an animal for food, Joe sets off through the trees, comes to a busy road, crosses to a restaurant, and returns with roast chicken. . . .