The Wackness

Jonathan Levine
2008

Full disclosure: I fully expected to hate The Wackness. The graffiti themed promotional materials displaying a hip-hop loving whiteboy pot-dealer, who pays his troubled shrink in weed, appeared to be the absolute zenith of trite indie-film posturing. Add a heap of Sundance buzz, an Oscar winning legend, and a young actor in a crossover bid and you’re asking for a perfect storm of self-consciously “edgy” cinema. Yet despite my preconceptions The Wackness manages to be a seriously well-crafted effort, and an earnest piece of storytelling. The film is also a bit of a period picture, set in New York City’s summer of ’94, with a great rap soundtrack featuring some of the era’s most classic jams.

College bound Luke Shapiro (Nickelodeon vet Josh Peck) has just graduated high school and is in the throes of some mondo teenage angst. His extracurricular drug dealing makes him the life of parties he’s not invited to, and like most young men, he’s far more concerned about losing his cursed virginity than his family’s looming financial problems. Friendless Luke vents his woes to off kilter shrink Dr. Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), a shaky and conflicted man stuck in a loveless marriage. It’s the doc’s stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby) that Luke is after, and thanks to the typically desolate New York summer this admittedly “out of his league” girl unexpectedly latches onto him. Meanwhile, the specter of Rudy Giuliani’s citywide crackdown serves as an ominous harbinger of things to come, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain still hangs like a pall in the air.

Not to be overly cynical, but this sort of film seems made for Sundance success. Its the ultimate shout-out to wiggerdom – where black music and culture are celebrated and glorified, but made easily digestible by filling the bill with a lovably dopey white kid. It would appear that the only thing keeping The Wackness from multiplexes would be the inclusion of sexually active teenagers and some heavy drug use. Otherwise, the romance between Luke and Stephanie, and Dr. Squire’s midlife crisis could easily be the stuff of Hollywood focus-groupthink.

The film’s biggest problem comes from Kingsley’s character and performance, which for starters is complicated by a completely unconvincing and inconsistent accent. It would seem that Jonathan Levine has never put in face time with a real shrink considering that nothing even close to psychiatric help transpires in Luke and Squire’s meetings. Instead the office acts more as a crucible to both exercise and conjure up the generation gap’s demons. Squires wants to escape while Luke wants to fit in, Luke wants mind-numbing meds while Squires wants Luke’s youth. In a wonderfully clichéd move, the doc flushes his many medications and goes on a much needed bender with Luke which culminates in a night in jail and a makeout session with a ridiculously dreadlocked druggie (Mary Kate Olson in a jaw droppingly weird bit part). This emancipation isn’t particularly ridiculous from a scripting standpoint as Squires is stuck with a stepdaughter that barely tolerates him and a wife who treats him as if he were invisible (Famke Janssen with a cigarette perpetually glued between her fingers), but Sir Ben’s performance is so over the top as to leave the impression that the older actor is having a blast on the job, leaving Levine too intimidated to bring him down.

That said the film is quite well done overall. Peck’s performance as Luke in particular, is played with a mouth-breathing stoner charm that isn’t so much stupid as enthrallingly naïve and sincere. There’s also a pleasant level of sophistication in the depiction of Luke and Stephanie’s families. Both are troubled and imperfect, yet there’s no direct claim that either is abusive or “bad,” and despite the seemingly inflammatory moral shortcomings of the kids (promiscuity, the distribution of illegal drugs), you’d be hard pressed to consider either of them as truly bad seeds. The film’s sex scenes range from genuinely hilarious to embarrassingly overwrought, and while the drug use is generally handled with an elegant naturalism, there are a few scenes in which the actors are guilty of overdoing it. Still, Levine shows tremendous aptitude for depicting teenage pathos in a way that’s simultaneously amusing and honest.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka