Your tolerance for Youth in Revolt will mostly depend on how tired you are of Michael Cera. Little George Michael is this movie—he plays the central character, Nick Twisp, as well as Nick’s alter ego, a French lothario named “Francois Dillinger” who sports white loafers, high-waisted pleated pants, vaguely European bling, and a blossoming porn-star mustache.
Nick is lonely, lovelorn, awkward, and very much a virgin. When his mother and her boyfriend take him on vacation, he falls desperately for Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a girl who lives with her very Christian parents in a two-floor trailer nearby.
Youth in Revolt follows Nick’s increasingly implausible, desperate, and occasionally hilarious attempts to get and keep Sheeni, taking him through French prep-schools, arson, fake illegal immigrant smuggling, seduction, and shrooms.
Who wants to play a game of "Hide the Frozen Banana" with me?
Some of what transpires is funny, but often the plot doesn’t really make any sense. The movie is so twee, though, that complaining about plausibility seems like complaining about artificial flavoring in your Chapstick—yeah, it would be better if it were real, but there’s not really enough substance for it to matter anyway.
Cera pulls all his usual tricks—he spends some time without his clothes on, he runs around a lot with arms flailing, he wears a backpack that slumps his shoulders down. As usual, he stammers and stutters and is polite in all the wrong ways, he doesn’t fit in and has embarrassing parents, and he chases the beautiful, witty, but slightly strange girl. Everything happens exactly as you would expect.
Well, not exactly as you expect. Things just sort of happen, in an order, but without any kind of momentum or point. Rather than a satisfying story arc, this movie moves in a straight, stuttered line—the plot equivalent of one of Cera’s haltingly delivered, extra courteous pick-up lines.
Perhaps Youth in Revolt’s constant production delays impeded director Miguel Arteta’s vision: the movie is strangely off-kilter. Plot points and characters are brought in and then inexplicably discarded, from Nick’s Indian co-conspirator Vijay to Sheeni’s dog, both introduced for a few laughs then left hanging around the margins of the scenes, just getting in the way.
In fact, Youth in Revolt so belongs to Michael Cera that it seems sometimes as if all of the other characters are hanging around the edges, as human props who occasionally set up jokes. No one else is an actual character so much as a casting request—“slutty mom” (Jean Smart), “grouchy dad” (Steve Buscemi), “loutish cop” (Ray Liotta). It seems such a shame to have all these great actors forced to play second fiddle in a movie that doesn’t quite know what it’s doing, but this movie is clearly meant to be a Michael Cera showcase. It’s just not clear whether we have any use for one.
