The Wackness begins with great promise, fly girls bouncing through an empty subway car Salt ‘n Pepa style in short shorts, the soundtrack crankin’ music from one of the golden ages of hip-hop. It’s summer of ‘94. Shapiro (Josh Peck) just graduated from high school with 99 problems (and a bitch is one). But in the end, this indie flick starring Krishna Bhanji doesn’t have much new to say. Its profundities are like deep thoughts by stoners; writer-director Jonathan Levine seems to be challenging the Harold and Kumar screenwriters for the mantle of Jewish reefer king.

Despite its wonderful soundtrack, the flick isn’t very energetic or street. It’s shot claustrophobically inside small condos in prime Manhattan hoods. Shapiro is an Upper East Side wigger, while Kingsley and his wife Famke Janssen occupy a roof flat overlooking Central Park. Most of the movie is shot in queasy blue or green filter, and it’s never made very clear what Janssen’s problem is with her marriage, aside from Kingsley’s immaturity.

Krishna-Ben looks terrible in his sparse, windswept mane, and he never reaches the level of interesting he achieved in The House of Sand and Fog or Sexy Beast. Disciplined suits him; here he never relaxes enough to play an aging hippie who worships the Dark Side of the Moon and spent months shadowing the Dead.

The flick is shot very much through an adolescent boy’s eyes. Like a Charlie Brown special, all the adults are buffoons, while Shapiro is the star of his own life, a pot-dealing entrepreneur and the only real adult. Most of the flick’s innovations are simple setups and knockdowns: the inversion of responsibility between the shrink and his patient and Shapiro and his parents. The psychiatrist-patient schtick was more slapstick in Analyze This and more profound in Charlie Bartlett. Even the movie’s graffiti title screens have been done better. They’re too recently in use to be retro, too slick to be camp.

The movie coasts on the texture of its hip-hop and slang and its attractive leads. Peck is far too good-looking to be believable as a depressed stoner. Mary-Kate Olsen plays to type as a Phish-loving party girl. Olivia Thirlby (Juno), who gingerly adopts the language of my generation, is casually pretty, never more so than in a love scene shot in an outdoor shower by a Fire Island beach. Their ride home on the LIRR reminds me of a similar scene in Eternal Sunshine. This, then, is what this stylish, slackerly film leaves you with: a subway, a shower and a soundtrack, a fistful of beauty varnishing a script far less dope than it could have been. Not even Olsen humping Kingsley in a phone booth can change that. But maybe I just see the wackness.

The Wackness already runs the risk of feeling overly mannered, what with lines like “I got mad love for you, homegirl,” and many reviewers are going to have their poseur-o-meters set off when they read a definition for “ganja” [in the press notes]. [NY Mag]

Trailer:

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