In theaters January 8, 2010
Rating: R, Comedy
"Kiss me, you weenie."
That's what the girl of his dreams says early on to the teenage protagonist of Youth in Revolt. I mean, really, what's a dork to do? How in the world can he resist?
Indeed, he cannot.
The cool-and-kooky coming-of-age comedy, Youth in Revolt, gives Michael Cera the opportunity for both a star turn and a sort-of dual role.
Cera has established a recognizable comic persona - smart, awkward, deadpan, self-effacing, and endearing -- in such films as Juno and Superbad and on TV's Arrested Development (soon to be a big-screen movie).
Cera plays geeky high school outsider Nick Twisp, who lives with his divorced mom (Jean Smart), and whose father (Steve Buscemi) lives with a much younger woman.
When Nick meets Sheeni Saunders, played by Portia Doubleday, who lives in the trailer park where his mom has temporarily relocated and seems to already have a boyfriend of her very own, he hopes that she'll be the young woman to relieve him of his virginity.
But Nick's mom is about to move away again. So Sheeni suggests a complicated plan in which she and Nick can manipulate events so that they can stay near one another.
But to operate in such a confident and duplicitous way, Nick - strongly motivated by his Francophile girlfriend's tastes and taking a page from Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam -- creates a bold, mustachioed, arrogant, and unprincipled alter ego named Francois Dillinger to carry out their nefarious plans.
It's wish-fulfillment doppelganger Francois who manages to get Nick kicked out of the house so he is forced to move in with his dad and thus be closer to Sheeni.
Ah, young brains. Ah, young love. Ah, young hormones.
Director Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl, Chuck & Buck, Star Maps), working from a script by Gustin Nash that's based on the cult novel by C. D. Payne, keeps things moving along briskly and even makes use of a few animated inserts. But he falters somewhat in the latter scenes by going overly broad and failing to pay off our early expectations.
Despite the lack of anything revolutionary about YIR, however, and despite an unevenness as it speeds towards its climax, it has a refreshingly hip sensibility and a generous supply of laughs and smiles.
Arteta gets comic mileage out of his experienced, eccentric supporting cast, which also includes Justin Long, Ray Liotta, Zach Galifianakis, Fred Willard, Mary Kay Place, and M. Emmet Walsh.
And Michael Cera rewards his target audience by spoofing his own image while extending his range playing two roles and making a good-bad-boy bid to become a Ferris Bueller for the early 21st century. Oh, we've seen plenty of actors act opposite themselves before, but it's still fun to watch Cera do the split-screen drill and nail it.
Youth in Revolt is a watchable screwball farce about teen angst that's anything but revolting.
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Source:XMB