Pot Luck

Young at heart: Mary-Kate Olsen and Ben Kingsley in The Wackness.

In 1994 Manhattan, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), a newly
minted high school graduate, has to grow up fast when his cash-strapped
parents face eviction from their apartment—which means Luke has to ramp
up his sideline as a drug dealer in order to bail them out. Dr. Squires
(Ben Kingsley), on the other hand, is stuck in the throes of delayed
adolescence, thanks to his addictions to pharmaceuticals, bong hits and
flower-power rock’n’roll. 

Luke delivers grams of grass to Squires in exchange for
therapy, although Luke is suffering from the eternal problems
experienced by all lonely virgins in need of deflowering. Luke also has
the hots for Stephanie (Juno’s Olivia
Thirlby), the shrink’s “mad” cool stepdaughter, to coin the era’s
vernacular. Squires, however, slices through his own purple haze to
warn Luke of his lovestruck ambitions: “Life has a funny way of turning
you into the one thing you don’t want to be.” 

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Levine’s instant nostalgia for 1994, the year he
graduated from high school, may seem oddly sentimental for some
viewers, with his fringe details incorporating O.J. Simpson, mix tapes,
Forrest Gump, Sony Walkmans and rapper Method Man, who not so coincidentally turns up in The Wackness as Luke’s Jamaican-accented drug connection. Yet George Lucas copped similar retro vibes with the 1962 backdrop for American Graffiti, a film released in 1973 yet taking place in an era that, at the time, seemed light years away. 

So Levine can take auteurist license with his own
depiction of 1994 as the last age of innocence, a time when the
burgeoning hip-hop movement yielded a sense of streetwise poetic
urgency (the soundtrack, filled with tracks from Notorious B.I.G., A
Tribe Called Quest and others, is a wall-to-wall rhythmic earful) and a
new mayor named Giuliani vowed to clean up the unsavory aspects of the
Big Apple. The Wackness’ specific
setting also gives Levine room to mine satire; when Luke confides that
he has bouts of depression, Squires asks, “Has this got something to do
with Kurt Cobain?” There’s a neat visual bit showcasing Luke caught in
an afterglow swoon, as the sidewalk pavement lights up just like in
Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” music video. And in a clever casting
call, former Full House toddler
Mary-Kate Olsen, now a bubbly 20-something, makes the most of her
supporting role as a blissed-out free spirit enchanted by Squires’
Deadhead days.

Speaking of growing pains, Josh Peck is a revelation as
Luke, especially for those familiar with his mirthful mugging on
cable’s Nickelodeon sitcoms like Drake and Josh.
Slimmed down from his chunky wonder years, and unafraid to get raunchy
and real, Peck excels at delivering writer Levine’s snappy dialogue
(“I’m just not feelin’ all this ‘feelin’’ shit today, doc.”) while
charting Luke’s awkward path to adulthood. 

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Olivia Thirlby captures the nonchalance of heartbreaker
Stephanie, as she rationalizes why the relationship with Luke is
fraught with peril, albeit in 1990s slang: “I look at the dopeness; you
look at the wackness.” (Dope is good and wack is bad, remember?) Her
character’s synopsis of a neo-classic TV sitcom is likewise priceless.
And while rumpled toker Squires is the role that Harvey Keitel would
have killed to portray, Ben Kingsley hits a high amount of comic notes
in a memorable turn that highlights the offbeat appeal of this Sundance
Film Festival fave: Just when you think you’ve seen The Wackness before, you haven’t.