Youth in Revolt

Review By: Ryan Hamelin
RyanHamelin@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: B

You want my honest opinion? Ignore the letter grade. In this particular case, it isn’t even remotely helpful to you if you are deciding whether or not this film is worth seeing. Then why did I give it a B do you ask? Because there are parts of me that love this film, and there are other parts of me which passionately dislike it. Therefore, I can only justify giving it a middle-of-the-road grade, because when analyzed as a whole instead of as individual parts, a B was the only thing that made sense. Call it convenience, call it dodging my literary obligation towards fitting works of cinema into your high school’s academic grading system, but this is one of the most subjective experiences I’ve had watching a movie in quite some time.

A lot of it has to do with the writing of the film. The dialogue has a tenor and a delivery all its own, completely detached from what you or I would think of as reality. “Quirky” is the only word that really fits here, but even that is an absurd understatement. It revels in its oddity, and is quite standoffish towards allowing the viewer into its little universe, at least at first. After the opening 15 minutes or so, you accept the reality in front of you because of its strangeness, though it isn’t so distant as to exist completely for observation sake while also not being connected enough to have happened yesterday afternoon. The film includes brief sections of animation, achieved through various means, that act as bridges between settings and denote the passage of time, and the whole project feels sort of like it was cobbled together for a senior thesis film. That’s not to say that any of the ideas are bad or that anything isn’t achieved successfully, I’m just trying to convey the feeling of the movie, a feeling that will inevitably lead me to descriptive failure. You sort of have to see it to know what I’m talking about.

Michael Cera is the protagonist, and yes, he begins by playing the same character he’s played in every film he’s ever acted in. Here, however, his naïveté is heightened by the dialogue and by the alternative worldview around him, allowing him to push his persona even farther into the realm of awkwardness and cringe-inducing humor. He goes for broke this time, and I hope that after all this is over he’ll finally have gotten this individual out of his system.

What the film does afford him is the chance to actually spread his wings as an actor. In order to “get the girl”, Cera creates an alternative persona, François Dillinger, a chain-smoking asshole delinquent who is just horrible enough to get him kicked out of his mother’s house so he can go live with his Dad, who, through a series of manipulated steps, now resides close to his true love. The manipulative streak kicks ...