The Wackness
If you don't have kids, you probably haven't seen the Nickelodeon sitcom "Drake & Josh." It's a reasonably clever imitation "Odd Couple" about mismatched stepbrothers, and, as the fatter, dorkier of the two, Josh Peck is surprisingly fast on his feet. Over the course of the show's four-year run, though, the actor has thinned out and bulked up, and there's a strange, distant desperation that has crept into his eyes lately. Something's gnawing at the kid. "The Wackness" lets it out of the closet.
To an extent. Peck's character, Luke Shapiro, is a newly minted NYC high school grad who's renowned for the high-grade pot he sells. He was probably the first guy in the class to have a connection, and he hides behind the fuzzy cool of his reputation. For all that, he's lonely and depressed. One of his classmates wonders whether Luke was the most popular kid in the unpopular crowd or the most unpopular of the populars, and the casual remark nails him. Everyone wants him and nobody does.
One of Luke's regular customers is his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires, played by Ben Kingsley in hipster shirts and scraggly post-'60s hair. The two have a barter arrangement - dime baggies for therapy - and clearly we've left the Nickelodeon universe for funkier, less forgiving climes. Outside it's 1994, and a new guy named the Notorious B.I.G. is pounding out of boomboxes.
"The Wackness" is a coming-of-age drama from writer-director Jonathan Levine ("All the Boys Love Mandy Lane"), and the Giuliani-era time period, rendered with knowing fetishism from the soundtrack to the hero's vintage Air Jordans, is an indication we're in very personal territory. As such, and disappointingly, the movie runs along the track of many earlier coming-of-age dramas, with appointed station stops at Cynicism, Puppy Love, Puppy Sex, Puppy Heartbreak, and Greater Wisdom. I was especially reminded of Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 film "You're a Big Boy Now" - a good benchmark to aim at, but, man, have we been here before.
There's a girl, obviously, and the genre demands she be alluring and cruel in equal measure. Olivia Thirlby - the best pal in "Juno" - turns the trick with a nonchalance that takes our breath away along with Luke's. Her Stephanie is a Manhattan rich kid who owns the world with such grace that we happily hand her the keys. She also has just graduated and her friends have jetted off to Europe, so Luke is the only object of interest during a long, hot summer.
A further wrinkle: Stephanie is Dr. Squires's stepdaughter. Knowing how easily the girl gets bored, the psychiatrist sternly warns Luke away but he gets only a horselaugh in response. Since Dr. Squires is by far the biggest basket case in the film - including Luke's parents, whose marriage is rancorously falling apart - the kid takes this as a green light.
Yet the scenes between the sad burn-out boy and his shrink form the heart of "The Wackness," and they're delightful mostly because Kingsley is. Dr. Squires's own marriage to Stephanie's mother, a bitter gazelle played by Famke Janssen, is coming undone, and like Kevin Spacey in "American Beauty" the stress frees him to be as outrageous as he needs to be. All the beatnik energy the good doctor has been repressing for years comes bursting out in long, hilarious, bar-crawling nights of the soul shared by grizzled mentor and teenage mentee.
What's bugging Luke? For one thing, while he's trying to figure out how to be an adult the grown-ups in his life are acting like children. It's hard to argue the point when his psychiatrist is picking up one of Luke's regular clients - a blissed-out hippie chick played by (wait for it) Mary-Kate Olsen - and admittedly the scene where she and Dr. Squires get busy in a phone booth is a growth experience. It's just not Luke's.
Funny thing about "The Wackness," though: Kingsley and Thirlby and the exquisite chestnuts of 1994 on the soundtrack (A Tribe Called Quest's "Can I Kick It?" Oh, yes, you can) end up crowding Luke Shapiro right off the screen. The film is a comedy about the paralyzing unhappiness that can overtake young men and old men alike - and a tragedy about the joy that can sit momentarily in the palms of our hands - but the curse of coming-of-age movies is that the hero is too often a passive receptor, and so it is here. Only Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" managed to avoid this trap, and Josh Peck, sir, is no Dustin Hoffman. Not yet, anyway.
The title? It comes from a slangy conversation between Stephanie and Luke, in which she accuses him of focusing pessimistically on all the "wackness" in life while she sees all the "dopeness." "The Wackness" splits the difference. It's a world of wope.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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