For all intent and purposes, Charlie Bartlett is a generation removed from the current crop of teen movies. It has neither the vapid, unreflective tone of commercial fluff (Nancy Drew, BRATZ) nor the biting super savvy wit of low budget feel-goods (Juno, Superbad). It exists in a bubble of pseudo-serious whimsy that owes much more to the lesser films of the 80s teen canon, and somewhat more flatteringly, the work of John Hughes. It also evokes a playful moroseness that almost willfully channels Harold and Maude with moderate success. Cat Stevens' "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" even plays a recurring role in the narrative which seems like almost too obvious a nod to the 1971 Hal Ashby classic. Then again, a kid like Charlie Bartlett probably would have seen the film more than once, so maybe it does work its way in with some bit of logic.Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is an outsider of the atypical sort. He's smart and funny, not shy or particularly strange. But his reputation as a schemer has gotten him expelled from every respectable private institution and forced him into the adolescent exile that is public high school. He shows up wearing a blue blazer and speaking in his natural, highly articulate manner. The less polished population instantly transforms him into the butt of their jokes and the school's biggest bully throttles him at will. A resolved, desperate to be popular Charlie sets about to convert the school one student at a time, beginning with his harshest opponent: the school's miserable tough guy, Murphey (Tyler Hilton). He delivers and impassioned, well rehearsed speech in the back of a limo, and having ingratiated himself, offers to be Murphey's friend and business partner in a high school pharmaceutical sale. Together they team up to form a bathroom stall amateur psychiatry operation in which Charlie diagnoses the "patient" and Murph dispatches the essential meds.
The plan works well enough but complications emerge when Charlie's interest in a fellow student, Susan, (Kat Dennings) causes him to enter unintentionally onto the radar of the school's ill-equipped, eager to prove himself principal (Robery Downey Jr.), who also happens to be Susan's father. A second, even more tenderly considered story emerges out of this emerging difficulty, unearhing a side to the film that goes beyond the promising page one premise. The film is more than just a neat series of goofs about Generation Rx and the misinformed parentals nipping at their heels. It contains more than a few very delicately balanced subplots, which include Charlie's sore spot about his mysteriously absent father, a substance abuse problem, and a depressed and potentially suicidal student. All three could feel torn out of the Teen Angst 101 handbook, but the screenplay by Gustin Nash, warms itself to us ever so gently and makes us care about things we might dismiss in other movies. A few too many ideas get bandied about and more than a few threads hang loose, but the film does what a story this familiar shouldn't be able to do: get us involved.
It also doesn't hurt that the cast, beginning with Yelchin and continuing all the way down the roster, is superb. The 19 year-old phenom at the center of the film is destined for greater things. He walks through this part with an almost too perfect blend of innocence and all-knowingness that definitively captures the overly matured and perhaps a little too ambitious Charlie. He also delivers comically in ways leading players tend not to be able or willing to do. Running around half naked on Ritalin and manically playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on piano (after claiming it's the song his father died to - which it isn't) are just a few of the brave, wonderfully played instances of Yelchin's likable, attitude free comic side. He stands up ably in both comic and emotionally daunting scenes with the brilliant Robert Downey Jr, who also does fine work as the school's conflicted principal, a role that suits him surprisingly well. Seeing the notoriously outrageous Downey confined within the shell of this uncomfortable administrator only heightens the character's sense of displacement. He is a man who has remained as damaged as a hormonal adolescent well into his adult years, and he copes poorly with the pressures his adulthood has brought upon him. It's a great role in which Downey energizes his comic zingers and executes the more emotional material with a deeply felt darkness that almost feels out of place in such a light-hearted film.
A comfortable throwback with rewarding sincerity, Charlie Bartlett is admirable and very fun, though it may never cause you second thought. It's a brief stay with charming characters in a perhaps too neatly packaged bundle that overstates the obvious and underutilizes its detectable taste for originality.
Grade: B
