Youth in Revolt

Review

Miguel Arteta’s rollicking Youth in Revolt is one of several recent movies to elevate the generic coming-of-age teen sex comedy to a plane of surrealism. Superbad was a near-mythic odyssey into the unruly American libido, Gentlemen Broncos a crazed, Mormonism-fueled study in sublimation. I love this new breed of dirty movie. It goes beyond leering, beyond sexism, to the core tension of a culture that ricochets between Puritanism and promiscuity. And it has in Michael Cera a sterling mascot.

Cera is the least sexually threatening juvenile in history. He’s skinny and hairless, with zero muscle tone and a high head-voice that an eighteenth-century castrato would have killed for. To avoid projecting hysteria, he affects a glassy deadpan. Yet he speaks fast and with startling precision, as if hyperarticulateness might cover for his uncontainable bodily functions. In Youth in Revolt, Cera has a marvelous pedestal for his sexual panic.

Part farce, part fever dream, the movie is based on a novel by C. D. Payne called Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp—the twitty, wispy moniker fitting Cera like a glove, and not the kind you wear in winter. A disarming beauty named Portia Doubleday plays the irrepressibly teasing Sheeni Saunders, who’s turned on by everything French. So Nick concocts an alter-ego called “François Dillinger” (played by Cera with a pencil mustache) to liberate his id. Director Miguel Arteta keeps the action hurtling forward as Gustin Nash’s script piles on crisis after crisis to the brink of absurdism—calamities that Nick leaves behind as his drive to have Sheeni propels him on. He ends up running from police in his undies and at one point a dress; in classic screwball style, his libido both empowers and emasculates him. But when he tells her he’d like to tickle her bellybutton from the inside and she gasps in pleasure at his newfound effrontery, the humiliations he has gone through seem worth it. Of course, Youth in Revolt—like all the movies in this genre—is a straight-male fantasia. The hope is that women directors will come along and show horny boys the power of what they’re up against—along with the anxieties that, despite la différence, they have in common. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (1/18/10)