Review: Youth in Revolt

Michael Cera is nerdy, awkward teenager Nick Twisp, a lover of foreign films and Frank Sinatra, who lives with his trashy middle-aged mother (Jean Smart, in her element), who seems to have a never-ending stream of hopeless boyfriends like loser Zach Galifianakis. It’s this latest beau, whose shady dealings with some very pissed off sailors that inspires the trio to flee to a trailer park. Here Nick meets a pretty girl with seemingly impossibly compatible tastes. Her name is Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), a fellow 16 year-old and obsessive Francophile, who quickly has Nick under her thumb, despite already having a snooty rich boyfriend. Nick is undeterred, dreaming up a cooler alter-ego named Francois Dillinger, who is the destructive bad boy that Nick could only dream of being (Except, because Dillinger is only a figment of Nick’s imagination, or at best, a second personality, it really is Nick. Ouch. Brain hurts). This results in Francois encouraging Nick into all manner of juvenile delinquency, just to impress Sheeni. Unfortunately, things start to get out of hand, and Nick ends up with The Man on his tail. Steve Buscemi plays Nick’s loser father, who is dating someone half his age. M. Emmet Walsh and Mary Kay Place are Sheeni’s bible-thumping parents, Rooney Mara is Sheeni’s sexy boarding school roommate, Fred Willard is Nick’s do-gooder lefty neighbour, Justin Long is Sheeni’s shroom-loving brother, and Ray Liotta is a cop who becomes Smart’s lover, once things go to pot with Galifianakis.

 

Released in most places in early 2010, this dark and quirky teen comedy from director Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl”) and improbably named screenwriter Gustin Nash (“Charlie Bartlett”) is an adaptation of a C.D. Payne series of novels. It’s a near-miss with some enjoyable moments (and a few very funny ones including one involving a car) and a solid cast, but something stops it just short of being good. For some, Michael Cera has gone to this well once or twice too often, but I’ve got little problem with him playing a variation of the standard awkward wannabe geek-hipster Michael Cera character. I do however think that he, director Arteta and writer Nash fail to properly portray the character’s Holden Caulfield-esque secondary personality to the point where it comes in and out of the film for too greater lengths to be a truly organic part of the story. Cera otherwise plays the role perfectly fine (even if Nick Twisp is arguably the most insufferably twee character name of all-time), but the Francois Dillinger really ought to have been dropped, sacrilegious to say so or not. It just doesn’t work and Cera isn’t very good in the role.

 

I also found it a little hard to latch onto anyone in the film because there isn’t a single likeable character in the film. Cera’s Scott Pilgrim wasn’t the most virtuous guy in the world, but Nick Twisp is frankly, a bit of a pretentious twot. He’s completely self-absorbed and self-serving from start to finish, and it’s only Cera’s innate likeability that keeps Twisp from being truly off-putting. But even the object of his affections, played by Portia Doubleday (best unintentional porn name ever) is equally self-absorbed to the point where to me she didn’t seem all that interested in Twisp as anything more than the guy who minds her dog and makes her feel good through his pursuit of her. But these somewhat manipulative leads are light-years ahead of the caricatured roles played by Jean Smart (admittedly well-cast), Zach Galifianakis, Ray Liotta (who I swear is no longer an actor but really an escaped mental patient who still wears his police uniform from “Unlawful Entry”), and especially the one-dimensional fundamentalist zealots played by Mary Kay Place and M. Emmet Walsh (the latter is about 25 years too old for his role). Worse still, talents like Fred Willard (who gets a laugh from his first second on screen) and Steve Buscemi are wasted.

 

The weird thing about all of this is that it almost works (Certainly the tone and characters are never quite as off-putting as in say, a Wes Anderson movie or the suffocatingly snarky  “Juno”). It’s quite funny, it’s never dull (especially if you like teen/coming of age stories), and the slightly twisted/quirky tone works in its favour a fair amount of the time. But with unlikeable and caricatured characters, combined with an unconvincingly (not to mention inconsistently) integrated multiple personality angle, the film is never quite as enjoyable as you want it to be. It’s certainly not up to the standard of “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”, another film where Cera was a gawky young guy trying to overcome many a roadblock in his quest to win the heart of the girl of his dreams.

 

Rating: C+