This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Part Rushmore, part Porky’s, the coming-of-age comedy Youth in Revolt, based on a series of novels by C.D. Payne, is equal parts adolescent rebellion and first blush of love, but none of it manages to come together into anything that works. Worse, the film feels like a bad case of déjà vu; we can never shake the feeling that we’ve seen it all before.

Michael Cera plays Nick Twisp, a peculiar but affable teen with a taste for high culture, Fellini movies and the music of Frank Sinatra. He lives with his trashy, divorced mother Estelle (Jean Smart) who has shacked up with Jerry (Zach Galifianakis), a good-for-nothing loafer whose only talent seems to be running scams. When one such scam goes awry, the dysfunctional family packs up and hides out at an RV camping resort.

There, Nick meets pretty, precocious Sheeni (Portia Doubleday), a young Francophile who is more than Nick’s pop-cultural match. Sheeni is terrifyingly sure of herself. Either that or she plays a totally convincing game. Either way, Nick can’t tell the difference (and initially, neither can we), so he takes her for an old, free-spirited, sexually confident soul in the unassuming body of a young girl.

Nick and Sheeni should be soul mates. They are nearly ideological and philosophical twins. But while Sheeni isn’t interested in the John Wayne version of manhood (she already has a square-jawed but decidedly preppy boyfriend), she knows she wants more than ineffectual, milquetoast Twisp. Sheeni gives Nick one ray of hope: “You must be bad, Nickie,” she tells him, less because she thinks he will take her advice and more because it pleases her to unsettle him, “Very, very bad.” Nick’s particular form of teenage rebellion takes its inspiration from a poster on Sheeni’s wall of Jean Paul Belmondo who famously aped Bogey in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Nick dresses his alter ego in dark sunglasses, a pencil thin moustache and an omnipresent cigarette, and names him Francois.

Francois, who pops up like an invisible devil on Nick’s shoulder, sets the well-mannered boy on a path of personal and social destruction that includes the ruin of several vehicles, arson, theft, drug use, expulsion and identity theft, all desperate attempts to capture Sheeni’s fickle attention.

It is hard to think of a less manly man than Michael Cera who has made a short albeit successful career playing timid, nebbish characters (Juno, Superbad, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist) caught in some state of arrested male development. That is exactly why he is perfect for this role and should you derive any enjoyment from this film, it will be because Cera, who always turns in winning performances, is the only actor who could successfully pull off this role. But the film doesn’t rise to his level, nor does it follow through on its potential—what was a perfect opportunity to irreverently examine the idea of the seditious doppelganger within all of us is wasted.

Youth in Revolt, which was an unsuccessful play and television series before finally making it to the big screen, has humorous moments, but they never solidify into something greater than their amusing parts. There is little to nothing to separate it from other, recent indie teen comedies like Juno, Adventureland and Paper Heart, films that also rely heavily on quirky casts, indie-rock soundtracks, animation interludes and too-cool-for-school sensibilities. Or perhaps it is because Youth in Revolt has one of the most dishonest endings in recent memory, a conclusion that is not simply insincere, but a bold-faced lie that stands in opposition to every frame of film that has gone before it.

Cast: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, Ray Liotta
Director: Miguel Arteta
Rated R for sexual content, language and drug use.
Running time: 90 minutes

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.