Fearing he’s going to die a virgin, oddball sixteen-year-old Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) invents an alter ego, the rebellious Francois Dillinger, hoping this new bad-boy persona will help him bed Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a pseudo-intellectual, French-obsessed blonde whose parents are religious fanatics. Nick’s plan seems to work, but perhaps a little too well, as what began as a mostly harmless bit of fun leads to wanton criminal activity and destruction of property.

CRITIQUE

A short while back I gave into the hype and picked up a copy of C.D. Payne’s Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp, the book on which this movie is based. While it hasn’t reached the same level of fame and devotion as something along the lines of The Catcher in the Rye (to which it’s been compared, for whatever that’s worth), Payne’s book has developed a fervent cult following and spawned a handful of follow-up tales. I read about fifteen or twenty pages before throwing in the towel, which is a rarity for me, as I try to finish any book I start, only giving up on the ones I know will have no redeeming value whatsoever.

The book is presented as a series of journal entries penned by Nick, who immediately comes off as one of those pretentious, unlikable teens invented by writers who wouldn’t know a real iconoclast if one walked up and punched them in the face; I knew there was no way in hell I could make it through five hundred pages of this guy’s ramblings. I hadn’t had as violent an initial reaction to a piece of teen-protagonist-driven fiction since Juno, and I’ll go to my grave hurling invective at that movie (I know, I know--change the record already), so I knew I’d better get out while the getting was good.

So, you may be wondering, if that was the case, why bother watching the movie? Well, because both Jaws and The Godfather were awful on the printed page, and the subsequent movie adaptations turned out okay, so you never know. Well, now I know. And while this movie doesn’t improve on it source material the way those two did, it’s still an improvement over the book (or at least what little I managed to stomach).

Youth in Revolt isn’t a great movie, or even a very good, but it is a pretty good one, held back from greatness (or very goodness) by a script that doesn’t give the plot enough room to breathe, an annoying tendency to pull the story and characters back from the dark brink on which they should be standing, ho-hum quirkiness (although these days there doesn’t seem to be any other kind) and an ending that doesn’t satisfy.

This movie--adapted by Charlie Bartlett screenwriter Gustin Nash and directed by Miguel Arteta, who helmed Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl--was rather long in coming, with a release date that kept getting pushed back, and it’s not hard to tell that it’s been cut down from a much longer running time (characters come and go, relationships begin and end with no rhyme or reason), reshaped and retooled, with input regarding its ultimate form coming from a number of sources. Idiosyncratic isn’t a quality that can be dictated by a committee, especially one with commercial prospects on its mind.

This movie needed to be relentlessly hard and pointed, but it’s only so on occasion, the rest of the time exhibiting the sort of mass-market quirkiness that fuels movies like Little Miss Sunshine. When you think about it, Nick and Sheeni have a really sick relationship, which does comes through at times, but this is overwhelmed by a sickly sweet quality; each will go to extreme, obsessive lengths to ensure they stay together (read: so that the other can’t escape), but we’re supposed to believe that at heart they’re just a couple of cute teenagers in love, as if they walked out of a damn John Hughes movie. The relationship is more twisted around the edges than it is twisted through and through, and it really should be the latter.

The contrived, for-the-masses quirkiness comes in the usual forms. Nick and Sheeni favor music and movies no member of their age group ever would, and some of the dialogue falls in line with the sort of arch patois that so many of these movies feature, calling attention to itself at every turn. The opening and closing credits play over animated sequences, the former a clay-animated offering that is one of the movie’s highlights, the latter a 2-D spot that falls flat.

Midway through the movie a road trip taken by Nick and one of his friends (like many supporting characters, this guys shows up out of nowhere and vanishes back to nowhere) is presented in limited-animation form, and while it might play fine as a sequence unto itself, it proves to be rather distracting in the context of the movie. The characters are often thinly drawn, given one or two “funny” characteristics in place of actual personalities. It was obvious a decade ago that all of this copy-cat cuteness that followed in the wake of the success of people such as Kevin Smith and Wes Anderson would eventually become boring and obvious, and I think it’s safe to say we reached that point a few years ago. Unless it’s performed by someone who can make it seem natural, it’s as cliché as your average romantic comedy or underdog sports flick, which is the case here.

What works in the movie doesn’t require as much space. When it stops trying to be an indie-flick greatest hits package and just tries to be its own mean, dark self, the movie is funny and entertaining. (Depending on who you are, that last statement is either all the recommendation or all the warning you need.) Some of the unaffected dialogue is very funny. Cera does the same milquetoast character he’s played in umpteen movies over the past few years as Nick, but he’s actually pretty good as Francois, his laidback detachment translating well to the character’s petty, self-absorbed vicious- and smarminess. And thank the maker for Fred Willard and M. Emett Walsh, who somehow manage to take the tired gag about an old man slipped some sort of mild-altering substance and make it funny. That’s no mean feat.

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC--looks quite good, capturing the mostly naturalistic visuals quite well. Some of the primaries are bright and just this side of bold (given when and where they pop up, they’ve likely been intentionally pushed), but saturation never goes overboard. Depending on the shot, detail can either be merely okay or rather impressive (Cera’s mustache is just sad). Darker scenes don’t look all that great, but thankfully there aren’t that many of them.

THE AUDIO

In keeping with the indie aesthetic, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track favors the front channels, with the scant surround action coming in the form of a few directional effects, a bit of mild ambiance, and some music bleed. Dialogue sounds good, as do the soundtrack selections (consisting--surprise, surprise--of a few ‘80s pop hits and songs by alternative bands no one’s ever heard of). Aside from reinforcing the music and adding some welcome heft to one brief bit of mayhem, the low end has no real presence. No other audio options are included; English and English SDH subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The commentary by Miguel Artega and Michael Cera is dry and spotty, containing only a smattering of interesting comments and info.

A few deleted scenes (10 minutes, HD) don’t help fill the obvious gaps in the story, but they do offer a couple more laughs.

A couple deleted/extended animation sequences (7 minutes, HD) illustrate my previous point: they’re fine when taken on their own, but would have seemed out of place in the movie.

Some videotaped audition footage (8 minutes, SD), featuring Doubleday, Galifianakis, and a couple others, is also presented.

BD-Live connectivity will give you access to a movieIQ track, which offers cast and crew bios, filmographies, production trivia, etc.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I can’t help but wonder what the end result might have been had Nash and Arteta been left to their own devices, but Youth in Revolt is still zippy and funny enough to make it worth at least one viewing.