Where were you in the summer of 1994? Who were you in the summer of 1994?

If you were a New York City kid in your late teens or early twenties listening to Wu-Tang, smoking mad weed and getting your heart broken, chances are you'll bond with Jonathan Levine's THE WACKNESS. The evocation of time-and-place in this earnest coming-of-age drama feels as powerfully spot-on as the Modesto, California of AMERICAN GRAFFITI or the small-town Texas milieu of DAZED AND CONFUSED; it's so right, you half expect Josh Peck's pot-dealing protagonist to stumble across a smallish film crew shooting some zero-budget movie called KIDS. Given that the picture spends a good deal of its first act fetishizing the early 90s, it's kind of surprising Levine didn't attempt a reference that precious.

But THE WACKNESS is so internalized and so relentlessly fixated on capturing the city in its nascent stages of Giuliani-fication that the movie slowly goes from evoking the era to becoming a part of it - which is to say it starts to feel like one of those scrappy little indie flicks that played the Angelika for a couple of weeks before getting lost amid the crap-cluttered shelves at Blockbuster. To Levine's credit, he has a much better eye than most of the unpolished filmmakers to emerge (and promptly disappear) from that movement; truth be told, he has a much better eye than many so-called "professional" directors working today. Still, the human drama at the heart of THE WACKNESS is either too solipsistic or too conventional to be of much consequence. True, getting your heart broken at the age of eighteen can feel like the end of the world, but you need to have a greater sense of the crumbling world around the character for their personal tragedy to connect.

Seeing as how Peck's Luke Shapiro spends most of his hours as an on-call weed dealer, you'd think there'd be plenty of world to go around; unfortunately, Luke is a socially awkward doofus who can't relate to people beyond a simple cash transaction. The only people he seems to enjoy spending time with are Percy (Method Man), his Jamaican supplier, and Dr. Jeffrey Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), the bong-toting psychiatrist father of Luke's longtime crush, Stephanie (Oilvia Thirlby). Sensing that Luke is harboring great sadness and resentment, Squires offers up a little therapy in return for a steady influx of that sticky; Luke balks at first, but quickly gives in when his father cripples the family's finances through a lousy business deal (thus necessitating a likely move from the Upper East Side to Jersey). He needs to talk things through.

What should be a mutually beneficial relationship, however, quickly turns one-sided when Dr. Squires clumsily tries to relive his childhood through Luke's. Though he's ostensibly giving Luke a lesson in l-i-v-i-n, he's mostly escaping the doldrums of his dead-ended marriage to Stephanie's mother (Famke Janssen). Squires's lack of compassion for Luke becomes apparent when he objects to the young man's romantic interest in his step-daughter; suddenly, his exhortations of "go get your heart broken" are hypocritically rescinded because, as he bluntly informs Luke, "She is not for you". Why? Squires knows that she'll use him and discard him. In other words, she'll break his heart. Isn't this your prescribed path to maturity, Doc? Sure you're not, like, jealous?(Knowing that Levine cut close to an hour out of the movie, I'm wondering if there's more to the Squires/Stephanie relationship than we're getting. The late night scene on the couch suggests a sexual attraction between the two; Thirlby's sending off crazy nymphette signals the way she's posed with the bowl of ice cream and the cigarette.)

In any event, Luke shrugs off Squires's warnings and continues hanging out with Stephanie; after a few walk-and-talks around the island, their friendship heats up into a summer romance. Rather than be all gauche and do it in the city, Stephanie whisks Luke out to her family's getaway on Fire Island, where she takes his virginity. Being a neophyte in the fuckin' game, Luke predictably mistakes carnal knowledge for a lasting emotional connection and unwisely professes his love to Stephanie. Big mistake, as she slams on the breaks and drops out of Luke's life the minute they return home.

Interestingly, the film doesn't evince much of a soul until the Fire Island interlude, and, once it's over, Levine lets the narrative fall back into its overly familiar rhythm. The third act is a real disappointment: there's a stock near-drowning incident, and, worst of all, the old in-person-confrontation-with-your-ex-flame-who's-currently-entertaining-another-lover (holenyohead) device. Essentially, we're killing time waiting for a pair of epiphanies (via Luke and Squires), but when the finally arrive, they're handled in too shopworn a manner to land with much of an impact. (While I love the idea of playing Luke out to "All the Young Dudes", flinging a joint into the camera isn't rebellion; it's douchebag behavior. Worse, it reminds me of this.)

I love a good coming of age story, even when it's shot through with cliche, but THE WACKNESS never mounts much of a case for itself. Despite a couple of solid performances (from Kingsley and, shockingly, Method Man) and a phenomenal soundtrack (Nas, the Wu, Biggie, etc.) it's neither funny enough nor insightful enough to stick out of the crowd. I actually much prefer Levine's debut feature, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, which, despite some very rough technical edges, demonstrates a mastery of theme that's lacking here. If we're lucky, it'll get released before Levine's third feature is completed.

Faithfully submitted,

Mr. Beaks