There's something ridiculous about building a celebrity millionaire movie career around playing awkward, nerdy, no-friends virgins.
That's like convincing all your neighbors to go green and give up their SUVs, then scooping up their Expeditions to open a used car lot. Or using your fame as a trophy dinosaur hunter to lobby for the creation of a prehistoric ASPCA. After a while, you really have to choose one path or the other, or at least you would if you weren't so busy plunging wads of twenties down your money-well (this is how the smart rich invest) to have to worry about anything.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Along with the "I've seen this before" factor, that's probably why I'm no longer jazzed about seeing Michael Cera's name attached to a project. That and I'm a fickle, easily bored consumer who demands constant variety out of my entertainment slaves! So it's no wonder the newest "Michael Cera struggles to get laid" joint, Youth in Revolt, thoroughly failed to arouse my overstimulated attention span.
On the run from angry sailors, Cera's mom takes them to a lakeside campsite to wait for the heat to die down. There, Cera meets and instantly falls in love with Portia Doubleday, the intellectual equal to his wimpy, hypersmart virgin.
When it's time to go home, their budding relationship may be brought to an end. But if they can get Cera moved to Doubleday's town a scheme that involves alter egos, felony arson and the wrangling of Doubleday's fundamentalist parents they may just have a chance.
Unfortunately, I never gave a damn whether they got back together or died alone in separate nests of French poetry and sadness. Cera and Doubleday share so little initial screen time their week together feels more like they brushed shoulders on a sidewalk. I get this is teenage love, meaning it defies even the already-loose rules of normal love (had to rephrase that from "adult love"), so it's not that I don't believe they could fall for each other so fast. I just don't know them well enough to care.
Also, they're pretty much jerks. There's a thin line between shenanigans and sociopathy. Even within the removed context of movie-watching, where I'll lustily cheer the bloody deaths of, well, everyone, I couldn't get behind Youth in Revolt's unrelentingly selfish characters.
As usual, if they'd been funny, it would have been a different story. Humor excuses everything. The Producers made Hitler funny. You could get away with using a team of chained toddlers as sled dogs so long as you told some good jokes while you were mushing around. Or at least made your team wear funny hats.
It isn't entirely laughless. Cera's alter ego a suave badboy named Francois Dillinger has some funny scenes, and a supporting cast stocked with ringers such as Zach Galifianakis, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, and M. Emmet Walsh contributes, too.
But Cera's character breaks less ground than a Nerf shovel, and a rushed, abrupt, episodic, convoluted plot tries to cram too much of its source novel into 90-odd minutes of movie. Somehow, it all makes sense, which is a credit to director Miguel Arteta. It's just not really worth paying the attention necessary to follow along.
Grade: C-
