Michael Cera Meets ‘Fight Club’
January 14, 2010 • By Drew Beggs, The Breeze
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Full of pretentious dialogue, sexual tension and Michael Cera, “Youth in Revolt” based on C.D. Payne’s novel, threatens to be another coming of age rerun of “Superbad” or “Adventureland.” Despite its similarities to recent coming of age movies, “Youth in Revolt” still offers an entertaining 90 minutes.
The film is rated R for sexual content, language and drug use, but it manages to avoid being overly obscene, though, at one point the dirty talk reaches a level of poetic refinement.
Cera (“Superbad”) stars in the film as Nick Twisp. True to Cera’s usual form, Nick is very sophisticated in his tastes and even more awkward. Last, but most importantly, he is a most desperate virgin.
He seems set to change the last fact after meeting Sheeni Saunders, played by Portia Doubleday in her mainstream debut, on a family getaway. Sheeni is intellectual, sexy, slightly obsessed with all things French and desperate to get away from her strict Christian parents and their two-story trailer home — built so they can “look down on the world.”
Alas, for poor, awkward Nick, Sheeni has an ex-boyfriend who is half champion swimmer and windsurfer, half bad poet and all snob, and she just isn’t all that interested in someone of Nick’s goody two-shoes stature. Enter the most interesting character of the film. It’s still Cera, but this time in the guise of François Dillinger, Nick’s alter ego. Complete with a deeper voice, mustache, aviator glasses atop constantly dilated and bloodshot gray eyes, François is surprisingly and irresistibly cool. With François’ help, Nick attempts to win over Sheeni by being bad enough and dedicated enough to do anything, including setting a fire worth $5 million in damages.
The two have a Tyler Durden-Edward Norton relationship, and it isn’t always immediately clear which personality is in control. But the confusion is minor, and the dialogue between Nick and François is some of the best.
On the other hand, while the dialogue between Nick and Sheeni is perfectly acceptable most of the time, it occasionally falls into a forced script-reading of pretentious hip-dom.
The ending, too, falls short of being truly good. It’s too much of a storybook ending, and it’s altogether too much of Nick being the sensitive, awkward, romantic type. Is this the moral of the movie: that in the end love is about being oneself? Perhaps, but this kind of ending has become a given, and it would have been better to see with a little more originality.
Overall, the film does pretty well, making the most of the relationships between its characters and the ridiculous situations stemming from them.
Contact Drew Beggs at beggsam@jmu.edu
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