The Wackness

I’m a drug dealer. Hear my cry,” deadpans Josh Peck’s angst-ridden ‘90s teen. It’s 1994, so everyone speaks like that. First comes emo ennui, then it’s m’eh deflation.
Like any respectable 17-year-old, our hero feels like an outsider and bemoans the bandwagon tendencies of his Gen X contemporaries; “One week they’re listening to Kris Kross, the next they’re listening to Pearl Jam.” A classicist, he only listens to cassette recordings.
Jonathan Levine’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama is jollied along by this kind of authentic detail. Luke (Mr. Peck), the director’s alter ego, is a Brooklynite student pot dealer who trades weed with his therapist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley hilariously channeling Harvey Keitel) in return for couch time. As Luke vents about his hopeless parents, lack of friends and difficulties with the ladies, the bond between doctor and patient blossoms into a complicated summer friendship. Secretly, Luke carries a torch for his older friend’s stepdaughter, the popular, promiscuous Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). Less secretly, his increasingly stoned shrink’s marriage is falling apart, a plot detail that leads to the not-everyday spectacle of Ben Kingsley nailing Mary Kate Olsen in a phone booth.
This loose limbed set up shares a little DNA with the docu-realistic Alpha Dog and A Guide To Recognising Your Saints. But it is the writer-director’s attention to historical detail that elevates The Wackness above the status of ‘What I Did On My Summer Holidays That Time’. Viewers of the right age will feel a certain Proustian frisson upon seeing freshly painted murals of the recently departed Kurt Cobain, not to mention the background chatter about Ritalin, hip hop, Beverly Hills 90210, ‘some new shit’ by Biggie and any number of complaints about ‘this guy’ Rudolph Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policies. The dialogue is equally well observed; utterances such as “I’m mad depressed, y’all” and “That’s how I roll” are delivered, in keeping with the fashions of the time, within inverted commas.
Terrific performances from Messrs Peck and Kingsley add weight to a slight story made even less consequential by period jadedness. But as a spin in a time machine, this is superb.