What ultimately makes movies like these work are the characters, the stories they’re telling almost secondary to the wonderfully three-dimensional individuals populating their respective melodramas. If you don’t have great characters, then you won’t have anything close to a decent movie, for in a genre that’s been as played out over the decades as this one if the people don’t grab you it’s pretty much a given nothing else about the project will, either.

Thankfully writer and director Jonathan Levine’s Sundance and Seattle International Film Festival favorite The Wackness has a trio of engaging principals worth taking the time to get to know. While we’ve seen this movie before, Thirlby, Peck and especially Kingsley are so downright enchanting the spell they craft over both the film and the audience is downright wondrous. All of them take chances and risks, going into recesses and corners some of which I just didn’t see coming, and even though the ultimate resolution to all this drama is a bit of an underwhelming letdown getting there is so entertaining at times I just didn’t care.

Truthfully, this isn’t a movie I’m probably going to be talking too much about come the end of the year. There is a routine over-familiarity that can get a little tiring. At this point, if we’ve seen one smart, misdirected good-hearted if still well-meaning adolescent drug dealer trying to figure his life out we’ve probably seen them all. More, there are only so many different ways you can ultimately take a film like this one, and even with the intriguing possibilities surrounding Shapiro’s and Dr. Squires’ relationship the avenues Levine ultimately chooses to trod aren’t exactly surprising.

Additionally, I wished the filmmaker had used some of his supporting players a bit better. Famke Janssen’s shrewish chain-smoking wife is never anything more than annoying, while Mary-Kate Olsen’s appearance as a free-spirited junkie-hippie-ingénue did nothing for me at all. Aaron Yoo and Method Man also show up in small, if pivotal, roles, but in all honesty both are so forgettable you almost don’t even realize they were there.

But this is a good movie all the same and another example of just how brilliant Kingsley can be when he finds a role to sink his teeth into. Lately it feels like the man doesn’t ever turn down a job, his face becoming almost as commonplace as Samuel L. Jackson’s. Here, however, he is downright sensational, and by the time the film was over I couldn’t imagine it without him. This is a magnificently moving multi-layered portrait of adult malaise that seriously blew me away, the Oscar-winner owning the movie first frame to last stealing it right from out underneath his two much younger costars.

Topping it off, The Wackness is filled with priceless moments of wonderment that couldn’t help but make me smile. The glories of that first kiss, the gentle giggle of a caring soul understanding their importance in a time of need, the almost harsh reality that father figures don’t always have all the answers and are sometimes as needy and naked as children themselves; the director fills his picture with a multitude of scenes just like these, all of them priceless and each of them reminders to the surreal oddity surrounding the dividing line between adolescence and adulthood.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Interview with actress Olivia Thirlby by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 SIFF Blog by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 Seattle International Film Festival Home Page
-  The Wackness Theatrical Trailer