The Wackness

Winner of the audience award at Sundance this year was THE WACKNESS, an idiosyncratic coming of age story from writer/director Jonathan Levine.

It’s set in New York in 1994 where hip-hop is raging and Luke, (JOSH PECK), has just finished high school and is whiling away the summer months before going away to college.

He pushes his ice-cream van around the streets dealing dope in a city that Mayor Giuliani is determined to clean up.

One of his more eccentric clients is psychiatrist Dr. Squires, (BEN KINGSLEY), who trades his shrinkage for a quarter of an ounce.

Most of his peers have left the city for the summer but there’s one significant person who has stayed. She’s Squires’s stepdaughter Stephanie, (OLIVIA THIRLBY)

Luke is such a passive creature that he almost sucks the blood out of the early part of the film, but it picks up when he and Stephanie go to Squires’s holiday home on Fire Island for a few days.

Some real emotion enters the film at this point and combined with Squires’s less than satisfactory marriage to Kristin, (FAMKE JANSSEN), the real focus of the film starts to come into play, which is the relationship between Luke and Squires.

The performances are all very fine, but the standout is Ben Kingsley’s Squires. It’s so unexpected. He’s a man in deep pain as Luke will be.

The Wackness has its charms but it has its unevenness too.