‘Youth in Revolt:’ Stylistically Arresting & Funny, But Way Too Baggy

“Youth in Revolt,” the twee-as-fuck new Miguel Arteta film adapted by the Gen-X novel by C.D. Payne, has a bouncy, freewheeling energy that’s easy to get lost in, at least for a little while. Then you start to wonder how a 90-minute comedy can feel draggy.

Michael Cera, who has never met a nervous, virginal teenage intellectual role he didn’t like, plays Nick, a nervous, virginal teenage intellectual. He sits in his room, playing cards with his nerdy best friend, occasionally stepping out to rent foreign movies from the local video store (where he’s bullied by classmates for his selections). He’s looking for something, anything, really, to jazz up his boring-ass life with his hussy mother (Jean Smart) and her trucker boyfriend, played by Zach Galifianakis in a role so short you’ve seen virtually his entire performance in the trailers. After Zach sells some marines a junky car, he takes the family and flees – to a fleabag trailer park. It’s there that Nick meets Sheeni (newcomer Portia Doubleday) and his life snaps into focus. She is his everything. She loves the same pretentious bullshit he does, and she’s also quite cute. Nick decides he will do anything to keep her away from her on-again-off-again boyfriend Trent (Jonathan Wright).

Knowing that the only way to keep the girl is to up the ante, dangerously, Nick creates a “supplemental persona” in the form of Francois Dillinger, who looks and sounds just like Michael Cera except that he’s got a moustache (less butch than gay) and loves to “blow shit up.” Soon the pair of them, in a kind of bizarre “Fight Club” buddy scenario, cause all sorts of mischief and soon Nick finds himself being hounded by various law enforcement officials for crimes he committed in the name of love.

In the beginning, you’re pleasantly along for the ride. There’s a title sequence, once the family heads off for the trailer park that is absolutely stunning. It’s a stop-motion sequence (a throwback the days when every comedy had an animated title sequence), scored to Fun Boy Three & Bananarama’s “It Ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It” and it immediately plugs you into this world, which has a sardonic edge but is still sunshine-y. Almost all the characters talk in the snappy, quips of a Wes Anderson movie, and the whole thing has the Andersonian sheen of a slightly displaced landscape – a world where the 1970’s hung around a little too long.

But just as soon as you’re enveloped in the world, you’re taken out of it. After Nick leaves the trailer park, back to his life in Oakland, California, the movie becomes a series of vignettes, more or less. You can understand this working in a novel, but in a movie it seriously slows things down and by the time you reach the final act, the movie has become hopelessly baggy, feeling excruciatingly long for a movie that clocks in at a svelte 90 minutes. Especially since it’s punctuated with some wonderful soundtrack moments, too.

This is a shame, because the movie is at times quite charming and funny (sometimes in spite of itself). Miguel Arteta, who directed the dark comedies “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl” with a kind of muddy matter-of-fact-ness, goes out on a limb stylistically. There are moments that are just unbelievably gorgeous, like a slow-motion scene of Nick in the shower, where the water glitters like at the beginning of “Antichrist.” Just to see a comedy that isn’t flat and over lit is something to appreciate. Also, Arteta’s handling of the scenes with two Michael Ceras really works, combining the right amount of old-school split-screen-y stuff with more visually sophisticated moments.

Additionally, this thing has an all-star supporting cast, each one of them relishing their small amount of screen time. People like M. Emmett Walsh, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, and the adorable Ari Graynor, show up and do their bit parts marvelously. Long in particular stole the show at our screening as Sheen’s drug addled brother.

But ultimately all the charm and smarts and sophisticated, stylish moments aren’t enough to lift it above the plodding rhythm the movie falls into. Even Michael Cera, as both the dopey hero and his edgy alter ego, can’t summon for the energy to keep it above a low-wattage buzz. “Youth in Revolt,” for all its arty rudeness, is in sore need of a revolution. [B] – Drew Taylor