Michael Cera takes comedy seriously. He has made a specialty of socially awkward young men, usually on the cusp of sexual discovery, a type that can very quickly get caught in the rut of graphic sexual humor. With Superbad, it looked like that’s just where he was going, but with Youth in Revolt, Cera has brilliantly shifted gears, and brings some of the sexually explicit material into what is essentially a romantic comedy, straddling romantic yearning and physical desire.
Cera’s character is Nick Twisp, a geeky guy who finds sexual release in a Penthouse magazine and a box of tissues. During a holiday — made necessary after his mother’s boyfriend is targeted by a bunch of tough sailors for selling them a dud car — he meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), who is slightly more adept at hiding her adolescent unease, but is equally willing to engage in the cultural posing, lamenting the death of vinyl records and creating a romantic figure of Gallic sophistication out of her current jock boyfriend, whose existence she uses to tease Nick.
The whole feeling of adolescent posturing, looking for an identity that fits, yearnings for another that are both romantic and at the same time clearly rooted in rampant sexual desire, is wonderfully portrayed here. Like all good humor, it is rooted in real experience, and the fact that Nick feels that he has found a
soul mate in Sheeni, as well as a potential sexual partner, lifts Youth in Revolt above Superbad and its many predecessors.
One of the bolder moves of this film is the creation by Nick of an alter ego, Francois Dillinger, a super-cool character who is his bad angel, urging him on to get what, deep down, he really wants. It is a device that harks back to Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam (1972), and could easily come off as overly contrived; instead, Dillinger fits seamlessly into the story, as Cera alternates between extremes of diffidence and assurance.
In order to win Sheeni, Nick needs to get away from his mother and her various ill-suited boyfriends, and also get Sheeni expelled from an elite school. To do this he has to do bad things. His alter ego comes into his own, and many humorous incidents, and some delightful minor characters, including Vijay Joshi (Adhir Kalyan), a classmate of Nick’s who comes along in the hope of catching some action, and Paul, Sheeni’s brother, who helps the story along with the aid of some magic mushrooms, appear all too briefly. Sheeni’s father, played by M. Emmert Walsh, is also terrifyingly funny.
There are plenty of laughs, and while there is a good deal of fairly graphic sexual humor — Nick and his friend Lefty spend time exploring some of the more exotic moves in a sexual manual — Youth in Revolt never becomes raunchy in the manner of American Pie.
Cera’s breadth of talent is more fully showcased in Youth in Revolt that in other recent feature films, and newcomer Portia Doubleday is excellently cast as Sheeni, managing to provide a strong female lead in what otherwise might be just a guy movie.
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