"The Wackness" gives us the '90s through a haze of pot
"I'm mad depressed, yo," says new high school graduate Luke (Josh Peck) in "The Wackness," an earnest, amusing coming-of-age, smoking-of-weed tale set in what is presented as the halcyon haze of New York in 1994, when pot was inexpensive, hip-hop was creative and the skyline presence of the Twin Towers was taken for granted.
JoJo Whilden/Sony Pictures Classics
Josh Peck and Olivia Thirby deal marijuana from an Italian ice pushcart in "The Wackness."
Rated R for pervasive drug use, language and some sexuality
Length: 95 minutes
Released: July 3, 2008 LimitedScore: 3.0
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Mary-Kate Olsen
Director: Jonathan LevineProducer: Keith Calder
Writer: Jonathan Levine
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
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Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, "The Wackness" won the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The movie seemed tailor-made to grab that honor: Its pointlessly desaturated icy blue-and-earthtone visuals signified indie "integrity," but its Ben-Kingsley-makes- out-with-one-of-the-Olsen- Twins sequence gave festivalgoers something to buzz about.
Peck (in a change of pace from his kid-friendly role on the hit Nickelodeon series, "Drake & Josh") is affable as the virginal, hip-hop-obsessed hero, a guy who provides his classmates with marijuana and hangs with gun-toting Jamaican gangbangers yet, inexplicably, is unpopular at school. Kingsley, meanwhile, adds another oddball characterization to a rogues' gallery that is beginning to rival Dick Tracy's (see the former Gandhi in "The Love Guru," "You Kill Me," "BloodRayne," "A Sound of Thunder," "Thunderbirds" and "Sexy Beast," to name a few). As shaggy-maned Dr. Squires (a role that in darker days would have gone to Robin Williams), Kingsley is an unhappy psychiatrist who dispenses sometimes inappropriate advice to Luke in exchange for the pot that keeps both these lost souls from blowing their stacks.
Squires is Luke's only real friend, but more seductive than the doctor's counsel is his free-spirited daughter, played by Olivia Thirlby (the best friend in "Juno"). A deglamorized Famke Janssen is Mrs. Squires, while Mary-Kate Olsen is a trippy Phishhead who is one of Luke's reliable customers.
Older viewers may find the mid-1990s nostalgia of "The Wackness" disconcerting. But remember: "American Graffiti" was chronicling a scene that was only about a decade old when it asked "Where were you in '62?" The hip-hop recordings that inspire this new film's young hero -- including "The World Is Yours" by Nas, "Can I Kick It?" by A Tribe Called Quest and "Flava in Ya Ear," featuring a then relative newcomer known as the Notorious B.I.G. -- are already farther in the past than the good-times rock and roll that George Lucas collected for his movie in 1973. In any case, the soundtrack of "The Wackness" is one of its real virtues.
Like many young indie filmmakers, Levine is stronger at imagining offbeat situations than at developing a strong story. The loose plot feels imposed on the offbeat characters, and doesn't link the people and incidents together in any satisfying way. Like the wayward Luke, "The Wackness" is in need of structure.
"The Wackness" is at the Malco Majestic and the Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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