Hip-Hop Heavy ‘Wackness’ Has Its Dope-Smoking Heart Actually Rooted In Emo

We saw “The Wackness” back in March and weren’t able or motivated enough to spit out a proper review then and since it comes out today, well, here we are. In our numerous posts about the film — including where we exclusively revealed the film’s soundtrack credits and CD details — we’ve almost said all we can possibly say about it. But let’s give it another quick whirl.

The bildungsroman tale chronicles a troubled teenage drug dealer (the up and coming Josh Peck), who trades therapy sessions for pot with his drug-addled psychiatrist (Sir Ben Kingsley). Their already-weird relationship is complicated when the hip-hop loving dealer falls for the doctor’s daughter (played by 2008’s soon-to-be indie It girl, Olivia Thirlby). The dramedy also features rapper Method Man as a Jamaican drug connection, Mary-Kate Olsen as a fruity hippie, Famke Janssen as Kingsley’s estranged wife and David Wohl as Peck’s pathetic and indigent father.

Set in Giulliani-villifying New York, circa 1994, much has been made about the film’s dope-smoking, nostalgia-waxing and hip-hop fetishizing through very rose-tinted glasses. Yet, the movie’s main flaw seems to be its disparate tones. Sometimes the film can’t decide whether it’s a comedy or a serious drama and the moods are definitely mixed and almost jarring. At one moment, the film is semi-cliched innocuous weed comedy, and the next its a semi-cliched romance story filled with sun-dappled photography straight-out of a Sofia Coppola music with similar Brian-Eno-like stargazing music. Yes, it’s fine to have a “dramedy,” but the moods aren’t quite seemless and the dsyfunctional weed, broken-home tale soon becomes a sentimental, woe-is-me, unrequited love story for the brokenhearted with a sad sack protagonist.

These crestfallen moments, while very real (yes, we can relate), seem a little too forced, a little too life-affirming and even almost-naively sincere. If you’re feeling remotely cynical these notes will probably ring sour for you (It’s a case by case scenario, but reviews are already sounding mixed in polar opposites). Given that we’re pessimitic optimists, the movie’s heart-on-its-sleeve emo-ness and naïveté both won us over and sometimes made us squirm. Either way it is an auspicious beginning for director Jonathan Levine, and we surely won’t be hearing the last of him anytime soon. [B]

It should be noted , we actually do want to see this movie again, as we were sort of on the fence about how we felt about the film for a long time. It may have the legs to be a grower. And as many quibble as we have you’d surely be better off seeing this than “Hancock,” “Wanted” or any of the recent studio dreck out there. Update: We saw “The Wackness,” again and we’re not sure if it was a different cut than the one we saw in March or if we’d grown accustomed to its problems a second time, but we’d like to grade our second viewing a B+.