Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, the story of a Jewish 18-year-old drug dealer finding summer love on the streets of New York City in 1994, is not nearly as interesting as it sounds. Rather, it is the latest in a string of half-baked Sundance favorites, having nabbed the Audience Award at the festival, but playing like a mishmash of original and unfinished ideas.
The protagonist, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), has just graduated from high school, and is on his way to gaining thousands of dollars selling marijuana. His swagger and his vernacular—which includes words like “dope” and “fly”—reflect his love of hip-hop culture, yet he is far from a stereotypical gangsta. Rather than being swarmed by the opposite sex or any sort of posse, Luke sits at home playing his NES and not much else. This is somewhat unrealistic, considering how much money Luke ostensibly has, and the number of characters to whom he deals drugs, but still he comes off as naive and weirdly inexperienced. Does he really not have any friends? How did he get into drug dealing in the first place? Do his parents care? The film never answers these questions, and unfortunately for Peck’s fine performance, it’s hard to fully sympathize with his character.
We might suspect that he’d be somewhat unsatisfied, which he is, in that he can’t seem to nab the object of his affections, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). She happens to be the stepdaughter of one of Luke’s clients, who is also his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley in an inexplicably weird performance). With his awkward New York accent and haphazard behavior, it’s hard to know what to make of him, and it seems that Levine didn’t know exactly what he wanted to direct.
But Luke’s relationship with Dr. Squires gives the movie what humor and message it has. To paraphrase one of the more memorable lines of the film, Squires tells Luke: “A man has to do whatever he has to in order to become the man he has to be.” This simple, powerful mantra drives Luke through the rest of the film, which goes mostly the way you’d expect, save for a warm, open-ended conclusion that evokes just how important it is to have new experiences.
As solid indies go, Juno this isn’t, even though it has several wonderful things in common with the Oscar-nominated film. The aforementioned vernacular of the characters, though it isn’t used by all of them, provides for an endearing urban aesthetic and quotable dialogue. The soundtrack is a sampling of East Coast hip-hop in its prime, with classics by Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Notorious B.I.G. making the cut. Music is an integral part of teenage life, and the film emphasizes this in the best of ways.
At best, The Wackness is a time capsule for 1994 -- a time where Rudy Giuliani’s influence on New York City hadn’t fully made itself known, kids were cooling off on rooftop couches and Illmatic was an album that everyone had to own. But I have a message for up-and-coming indie filmmakers: nostalgia is a wonderful thing, indeed, but try to give us something new to remember.
