Here’s all I knew about The Wackness going in: it won the audience award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it starred Ben Kingsley as a kooky psychiatrist, Mary-Kate Olsen had a cameo making out with the aforementioned knight of the British Empire, it had something to do with New York wigger culture and it sounded unbelievably annoying.
Happily, though, writer/director Jonathan Levine’s coming-of-age story turns out to be much, much better than the sum of its awful-sounding parts. Much of the credit goes to Levine’s clever script and vivid evocation of 1994 Giuliani-era NYC (including a pretty fly-for-a-white guy soundtrack featuring The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Biz Markie, etc. and a startling, throwaway shot of the Twin Towers), but Josh Peck’s shy, winning and completely relatable performance as dejected teenage pot dealer Luke Shapiro is so good it withstands comparisons to Dustin Hoffman’s breakthrough role as another smart, alienated young man in Mike Nichols’ 1967 existential angst classic, The Graduate (and Hoffman never had to deliver a line like “I’m mad depressed, yo” and somehow make it work).
Kingsley takes the Mrs. Robinson role here, chewing a fair amount of scenery as Peck's older foil, a pothead shrink who trades dimebags for 50-minute therapy sessions, urging Shapiro to seize the day, then turning hostile when he realizes the young man would rather seize his stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby).
Thirlby (Ellen Page’s BFF in Juno) is a wised-up, sexually precocious object of desire, and her chemistry with Peck is palpable as she urges Shapiro to quit focusing on the wackness of life and embrace the dopeness. For her part, Mary-Kate Olsen’s cameo as a stoned nympho hippie is relatively unobjectionable (and pretty funny in a meta way if you consider how recently she roamed the streets of the same but very different city as one of the squeaky-clean, family-friendly stars of the big stinky tweener bomb New York Minute). Famke Janssen, Method Man and Jane Adams also turn in reliably solid (if unexceptional) performances in minor roles.
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