The Spectacular Now

It might take a few beats to soak up what an accomplishment the new indie film The Spectacular Now really is.  Rooted in the familiar set up of lost teenagers coming of age, it tells its story gingerly but simply.  It courses a well-trodden path, and nearly in refusing to neither subvert nor flair with stylistic excess, the film feels real, delicate and graceful.  There's nothing flashy about The Spectacular Now, which was directed by James Ponstoldt (who made the twelve steps totem Smashed last year) and written by the (500) Days of Summer screenwriting team Scott Neustradter and Michael H. Weber.  Yet it's one of the most perceptive and emotionally intelligent film about teenagers to come around in quite a while.  Its seeming conventionality wears off sometime after viewing (at least it did for me) and settles into something a bit deeper-- a real world sense discovery of the great unknown that everyone faces as they make their journey into adulthood.

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) could be read as a cautionary tale.  A product of troubled marriage, whose well-intentioned but most absent single mother is busy providing away, he's a strong drinker and reckless youth seemingly on a road to nowhere.  Sutter touts his living in the moment like a personal mantra, but it's really more of a defense mechanism-- There's been countless after school specials and very-special-episodes of adolescents just like him, but the film is more potent and assured to make his case a prolonged PSA of angst gone wild teenagers.  Yet the film takes a different and more complicated approach, as Sutter, a high school senior, is also sharp as a tick with a confident sheen wrapped around nerdy and vulnerable interior; he's lost but he's fooled himself into a false sense of enlightenment.  Teller, in a revelatory performance, he strikes as a younger Robert Downey, Jr.-- with his motor-mouthed volcano of wit seemingly ready to pop and explode with the sense of real danger.