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Josh Peck as Luke Shapiro |
Showering praise on the wacky world of Luke
THE WACKNESS
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Certificate 15
LUKE Shapiro will always remember the New York summer of 1994. It is used as the backdrop for a deeply personal coming-of-age story, as we follow Luke bridging the world of high school and college.
Covering a formative three months – June, July and August – we see him fall in love for the first time, lose his virginity and, while his mother questions his father’s masculinity as his old man stumbles from one financial crisis to another, he becomes a man himself.
Shapiro earns cash and makes friends as he pushes his ice-cream seller’s box through the brownstone streets and the shade of the parks. But his customers are not interested in ices. It is a front for the bags of dope he is peddling. It just so happens one of his customers is his psychiatrist Dr Squire (Ben Kingsley on top form), who offers him sessions on the couch in return for something to pop into his joints.
Luke is a student who has spent his schooldays lurking in the shadows, neither popular nor unpopular, just there, his anonymity among his peers is confirmed by the fact they all call him by his surname – even the girl he has designs on.
It is a gentle film dealing with spiky issues.
It has got the sweat-drenched sense of a city summer and Josh Peck’s performance as Shapiro brings you into his world of under-age beers in bars, block parties, of joints furtively passed among friends and magic mushrooms nibbled in parks.
There are sub-plots spinning through Luke’s tale, which give him and his mentor Dr Squire a stage on which their personal dramas can be played out. The political atmosphere adds to the stifling nights. This is the summer of the recently elected mayor Rudy Giuliani’s zero tolerance policing strategy, and, for our two heroes, it’s a direct attack on their liberty.
Theirs appears at first to be an unlikely friendship, but the pair discover they have much in common. Dr Squires offers the advice of a one-time hippy who has lost something through having to balance his career with a base, animalistic need for hedonistic pursuits of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
When Luke suggests to Squires that a dose of happy pills could be the answer to his ongoing lethargy, unhappiness and teen insecurity, he is told there is no simple answer.
The Wackness reminds us of Ben Kingsley’s talents. He is superb as the doctor who has lost his way. He is forgiven for his appearances in two other films in the past six weeks, Elegy and The Love Guru, neither of which come close to his performance in this marvellous study of what it is to be on the cusp of adulthood.
The music, pumped out of a boogie box, cannot help but fill you with nostalgia.
For those of a certain age (ie, mine) The Wackness is more than a study of what it means to be in that twilight of childhood. It will fill you with an urge to look under your bed for your old mix tapes, blow the cobwebs off your tape deck and bust a few moves in the privacy of your sitting room. |
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