Youth in Revolt Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 01.11.2010

A tale of two Ceras.

Directed by: Miguel Arteta
Written by: Gustin Nash

Starring:
Michael Cera - Nick Twisp/Francois Dillinger
Portia Doubleday - Sheeni Saunders
Jean Smart - Estelle Twisp
Zach Galifianakis - Jerry
Adhir Kalyan - Vijay Joshi
Steve Buscemi - George Twisp
Fred Willard - Mr. Ferguson
Ray Liotta - Lance Wescott
Justin Long - Paul Saunders
Jade Fusco - Bernice Lynch
M. Emmet Walsh - Mr. Saunders
Mary Kay Place - Mrs. Saunders
Jonathan Bradford Wright - Trent
Erik Knudsen - Lefty



Running Time: 90 minutes
Rated R for sexual content, language and drug use.

Michael Cera is an actor for which there seem to be two widely diverging opinions. Some consider him to be a gifted young comic actor who helps make even bad movies that he is in somehow better. Others criticize Cera for essentially playing the same role in every film—himself—and that the act is growing very old. Whatever the opinion, few can argue that the twenty-two year old has become a very marketable commodity in Hollywood. Superbad, which was Cera's coming out party in 2007, grossed almost $170 million worldwide on a mere $20 million budget and his follow-up film Juno did over $200 million with just under a seven and a half million spent by the studio. His next film, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, likewise turned quite the tidy profit for Sony Pictures and it's only with last year's abominable Year One that the comedic performer showed a chink in his armor. Coming off the wounds off that film, Cera latest starring vehicle Youth in Revolt. Directed by Miguel Arteta and co-starring Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Zach Galifianakis, Ray Liotta, Justin Long and Steve Buscemi, the film promises to show whether Cera's act has finally grown too stale for American audiences or whether there's some juice still left in the actor's nervous and nerdy shtick.

The movie stars Cera as Nick Twisp, an unfortunately-named teenager with some serious home problems. Nick's parents are split up, with his mother Estelle (Smart) moving from loser boyfriend to loser boyfriend while his father George (Buscemi) is going through a midlife crisis—complete with unemployment, a twenty-something girlfriend and a BMW. Nick despises both of them for flaunting their newfound independence and love lives in front of him while he finds himself a sixteen year old virgin and instead professes a love for Frank Sinatra music, Fellini films and girls who ignore his existence. When he has to flee with his mother and her loser boyfriend Jerry (Galifianakis) following Jerry's swindling of three sailors on a lemon car, the trio ends up in a mobile home park called Restless Axles. It's there that Nick meets Sheeni (Doubleday), the girl of his dreams. But when Sheeni's ex-boyfriend Trent (Wright), her religious parents (Walsh & Place) and a sudden move back home dash those dreams, Nick is inspired by Sheeni to create a sinister, rebellious alternate persona named Francois Dillinger. Mayhem follows and while it seems to be doing the trick, it also gets a load of trouble on his tail and Nick must decide if being a bad boy and getting the girl is worth potentially destroying his life over.

Youth in Revolt is based on a novel of the same name by C.D. Payne, and has withstood more than one attempt to translate it into performance art. A theatrical play was staged in 1994, and MTV attempted to turn it into a television show in 1998 without success. It wasn't until Gustin Nash wrote the screenplay that the project was able to get off the ground. Nash has handled the idea of rebellious youths before; in he wrote the screenplay for Charlie Bartlett which became a 2007 film starring Anton Yelchin and Robert Downey Jr. Nash takes a more absurdist tack here, in keeping with his source material. The characters are not exactly the most well-rounded outside of Nick and Sheeni; all the parental figures are basically archetypes, and other characters such as Sheeni's stoner brother or Estelle's second, fascist cop boyfriend seem more like caricatures than real people. The tone fits the material for the most part however.

Nash skirts the edge of a few potentially disastrous clichés, such as some voiceover narration by Nick and some typical teen sex tropes, but he never truly falls into them. It is not as well-rounded of a script as the one for Charlie Bartlett and the tone becomes sometimes uneven. Nash switches between sentimentality and indy comedy with some occasional dives into low brow humor, and the transitions don't always work. On the whole the script is serviceable, but it is far from airtight as in the hands of lesser actors it could have been a disaster.

It is a good thing, therefore, that Nash's script got a cast worthy of lifting the material. People have voiced hosts of complaints about Cera before, and many of those criticisms are very valid. It is true that the actor has played variations of the same role in all of his movies to date; that fact was brought even further into focus with his last film, the independent mockumentary Paper Heart. In that, he played himself much like he has played roles in other films. Nick Twisp is certainly a character to fit along those lines. He's a romantic at heart, a hipster who has tastes outside of the mainstream and suffers for it. One can see the high aspirations toward love that he has, and his eventual finding of it is obvious even if one has never seen a single thing about this movie.

It is only when Nick creates Francois that we get to see Cera stretch his boundaries, and the result is something to enjoy. Francois is not a complete about face of Nick, but he is bold and doesn't care about society, or being a nice guy. He also has some great lines: when trying to bed Sheeni, he tells her "I'm going to wrap your legs around my head and wear you like the crown you are." Lines like that could have been delivered very badly, but Cera does it with just the right touch to make it very funny and impressive at the same time. It's a performance that is in some ways a double-edged sword, as it works within the movie but makes the audience want to see more of Cera pushing his boundaries and makes Nick less enjoyable as a whole.

As the female lead, Portia Doubleday is quite a find. She has an age to her, underneath the youthful exterior, that makes her performance quite wonderful. She's gorgeous, but in that indy way that reminds one of people like Ellen Page. She also has a lot of chemistry with Cera and makes their relationship work better by making us believe that this girl could fall for a guy like Nick. The supporting cast is all excellent, with Galifianakis drawing more traditional laughs as trucker Jerry and Liotta doing the evil cop thing he does so well. Steve Buscemi is solid as ever in his role as Nick's father George, playing an unlikable and selfish jerk with the best of them. Brief turns by M. Emmet Walsh and Mary Kay Place as Sheeni's parents, Justin Long as her stoner brother and Fred Willard as a crazy left-wing conspiracy theory neighbor are all quite well done and funny.

Behind the lens is director Miguel Arteta. Arteta's first high profile film was 2002's The Good Girl, starring Jennifer Aniston; before that was 2000's Chuck & Buck. Both films deal with troubled teenage boys, and thus Arteta is on solid ground. He does a fairly decent job balancing the material here, though the farcical material sometimes finds itself at odds with the rest of the movie's tone. He is wise enough not to go overly artistic, as an independent-feeling film like this could easily do; instead he lets the artsiness come from the actor's performances. In fact, his only true missteps are two animated sequences. The first occurs in claymation during the opening credits and seems to try just a little too hard to be quirky; the second comes during a mushroom trip by Nick and manages to deflate an amusing concept of the illustrations from a Joy of Sex-like book becoming animate. Otherwise, he keeps his attention on using the relatively low production values to their utmost and lets the actors do their thing…which is when the movie succeeds the most.

The 411: The success of Youth in Revolt will depend largely on one's opinion of Michael Cera. Those who still find his typical persona at least occasionally funny will generally enjoy this piece, which features Cera doing what he does best and then pushing that aside for the alter ego of Francois to solid effect. He is surrounded by a strong supporting cast, particularly newcomer Portia Doubleday as Cera's love interest Sheeni. The film doesn't always handle its tone right and director Miguel Arteta makes a few errors here and there, but for the most part the film is a satisfying (if not uproarious) coming-of-age comedy.

Final Score:  7.0   [ Good ]