"The Spectacular Now" (2013)

The interesting thing about The Spectacular Now is how, well, unspectacular it is. In one sense, it's just another one of countless films that tell coming of age stories -- a genre that is full of cliches and conventions. In another sense, the unspectacular nature is the honest mundanity of the story, and that's to the film's benefit. In the broadest strokes, The Spectacular Now is just another coming of age story, but in its more idiosyncratic story-beats and its attention to detail, the film rises above its conventions to become a deeply felt and sincere portrait of a specific time in young people's lives. It's youthful, hopeful, messy, intimate and sweeter than it has any business being.

Class clown Sutter's (Miles Teller) girlfriend just broke up with him, which, like most people, sends him into a spiral of depression. This is complicated by the fact that he's an alcoholic, although he can't fully admit this to himself. After a night of excessive binging, he wakes up on the front lawn of willowy nerd Aimee (Shailene Woodley). Miles initially seems to be using her to get over his ex (Brie Larson), but he also likes her for being so completely different than the crowd he's so used to surrounding himself with. Meanwhile, Aimee is so unfamiliar with relationships and romance that she's just happy to be noticed by someone -- anyone -- for once. An awkward, haphazard and sweet courtship between the two begins with neither quite sure what to make of it. They've both been insulated so long in their different cliques that they aren't quite sure what they've stumbled upon.

Everyone, including to an extent themselves, believes their relationship is all but doomed to fail. But somehow the very impossibility of it becomes its greatest boon as the two push eachother to get what they want out of life -- this might make it sound all too sappy but there's a certain naivete to this that makes it work. It's here where the story loses itself a bit, taking a detour into a subplot about Sutter trying to meet his absent father (Kyle Chandler, terrific as always). Outside of the relationship, the film stumbles, but inside the relationship it succeeds, forming a well-observed look at young love.

Sutter and Aimee remind me of more than a few people I knew from high school, and I mean that as a compliment. The characterizations of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber's script are realistic and recognizable. The film is ably helped by its casting of its two leads. Teller and Woodley give two fantastically unaffected performances, and actually look like the age they're portraying. Woodley is especially adept at expressing the naivete of someone who has had so little experience with relationships that she's functioning off cultural expectations and fairy tales. But there's subtler things throughout the film --  such as costume choices: never made to look cool or hip but like what high schoolers might actually wear -- which add to the verisimilitude. The film, with such nuance and heart, captures the peculiar rhythms of high school romances.

While, especially in its final third, the film skirts dangerously close to maudlin and familiar, it's hard to resist its earnestness. If anything, the film overreaches with its course correction to teen romance depictions just before embracing some ill-advised excessive sentimentality. That it succeeds in avoiding this sentimentality for as long as it has is a testament to how well rendered the tender story has been.

Grade: ★★★