Youth in Revolt

Unexpected fact: comedies starring Michael Cera, with supporting roles by Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, and Justin Long, aren't very funny.

The problem with Youth in Revolt, aside from its characters' tendency to speak like, well, characters, stems from its lack of organization. Is the movie a tender coming-of-age tale, a romantic cliche, a tongue-in-cheek homage to 60s francophilia? A suburban The Wild One? Unfortunately for the film, it's a little of all of them, and mostly none of them. Unable to restrain his project's boundless taste for the dilettantish and strange, director Miguel Arteta neglects to mold the idiosyncrasies into anything uniform or purposeful.

Portia Doubleday and Michael Cera do what they can to turn pretension and inexperience, their characters' loudest qualities, to their advantage. But ultimately Youth in Revolt is beyond the ability of any of its splendid actors to redeem it. The script is too weak, its vision too blurred. The film's structure is clumsily both gallant and indecisive, emphatic and vacillating. Too many of the roles are miscast, and those that are cast correctly remain mostly unexplored. Even Cera's doppelganger Francois, the Gauloises-smoking, aviator-wearing alpha male, who's sort of the whole reason to watch the movie in the first place, ends up being an unlikeable nitwit, less an Expressionist tool than an ordinary tool.

Contemptuous youngsters in love? They're counterfeit rebels, not luscious pets. Let me propose two alternatives to which we can turn. First, if you're looking for something a little more savage, forget Youth in Revolt and instead watch Terrence Malick's Badlands. It's a bit heavier than Youth in Revolt, but, hey, Youth isn't very funny anyway. Second, if you want a glimpse into the male sexual psyche, adolescent or otherwise, heed this woman:

"Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of attack. . . Biologically, the male is impelled toward restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness."

To learn that lesson do we really need to watch Michael Cera's Francois duping lonely girls into drugging his expatriated love, or committing arson in her sacred name (it's Sheeni), or abusing his hallucinated sex paradigm? Okay, that last scene, with the levitating, fantasy cartoon couple, that was cool. But, no, we don't need to see any of these things. We can try them for ourselves, or, in less sociopathic moods, read Camille Paglia instead. B-