Butler's Cinema Scene

Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller

“THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER”  My rating: B+ (Opening Oct. 5 at the AMC Studio)

103 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Coming-of-age movies are such a cinematic staple that it takes something special to get my attention.

“Perks of Being a Wallflower” grabbed me early and never let go.

This directing debut by Stephen Chbosky (who adapted his own novel for young adults) isn’t technically adventurous, but when it comes to characterization, dialogue and situations, it’s like the work of an old soul.

Or, rather, an older soul looking back on his own youth, since I can only imagine that big chunks of the story are autobiographical.

Our protagonist is Charlie (an astonishingly good Logan Lerman), a loner and “wallflower” who is not at all looking forward to his first day in high school.

Charlie has a past, we learn in the course of the film.  There’s the suicide of one of his friends and the driving death years before of his beloved aunt (a relationship jam-packed with hair-raising, late-arriving revelations). Moreover, Charlie already has endured one mental/emotional breakdown and lives in terror of yet another.

Charlie is the kind of kid who gets picked on because he’s smart and decent and can see through the desperate posing that passes for adolescent society.

Though a lowly freshman, he’s lucky enough to fall into the good graces of a small coterie of high school outsiders, seniors who recognize in him their own former selves.

Heading this goofy cabal is the openly gay Patrick (Ezra Miller, so mesmerizing as the “bad seed” teen of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”), a guy totally at ease with himself despite the crap that is thrown at him almost daily. Patrick takes young Charlie under his wing, guides him through the minefield of teen partying, and even confides to his young friend that he’s in a secret relationship with a deeply conflicted member of the school’s football team.

Patrick’s step-sister Sam (Emma Watson of the Harry Potter franchise) is a survivor of sexual molestation by an older man who has turned her life around after several years of promiscuity.  Charlie volunteers to tutor her for the SATs.  He is, of course, hopelessly smitten with her. So are those of us in the audience.

There are other members of this band of outsiders, most prominently a neurotic, pushy chatterbox (“Parenthood’s” Mae Whitman) who decides to make this inexperienced freshman her new beau…whether he wants it or not.

Charlie’s new friends are the sorts of people who stand around saying sarcastic things about “cool” high school society, then go out and dress up in fishnet hosiery to lead the live performance at a screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”  (the time appears to be the early 1980’s).

There are elements of Chbosky’s story that don’t quite work for me. His tendency to give each of his principal characters a troubled past (nymphomania, suicide, bullying, sexual molestation, kleptomania) often feels like overkill, and numerous subplots are introduced but never really go anywhere (the result, no doubt, of boiling a novel down to a reasonable running time).

But the film excels is in its depiction of adolescent pariahs who band together to support one another, ensuring their survival until they can enter an adult world where being a true individual is an asset rather than a wedgie magnet.

Young Lerman (he was Christian Bale’s son in “3:10 to Yuma” and plays the title character in the “Percy Jackson” franchise) is a major star in the making. He’s soulful, funny (he takes the cliche of a kid’s first marijuana experience and turns it into something totally fresh and disarming) and has a terrific voice, which he puts to good use in the film’s extensive (and semi-poetic) narration.

Chbosky has assembled a remarkably deep supporting cast, including Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie’s parents, and Paul Rudd (utterly sincere here) as the English teacher who becomes our hero’s mentor and confidant.

Given the familiar territory, the film could have gone wrong about a dozen different ways. But with a killer combo of storyteller and amazing young players “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”  becomes an intoxicating reverie about our shared youths.

| Robert W. Butler