The Wackness is a funny, touching mood piece about a New York City high-school grad named Luke (Josh Peck) and marijuana dealer who spends three months before college trading dope for therapy with his shrink (Ben Kingsley) and falling in love with the shrink's stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). It's set in the summer of '94, and underneath its jiving, wise-cracking surface, it's the cousin of Summer of '42, a previous generation's male fantasy of losing virginity to a beautiful and understanding woman.
What makes The Wackness a lot sharper is that Thirlby isn't an "older woman," and she doesn't think she has to love a boy to have sex with him. The movie honors the antihero's romantic yearnings without wallowing in them. If his dream girl moves him in ways he can't move her, he's still grateful for the feelings she stirs up in him.
I've always thought the great theme of adolescent literature is how a boy or girl or man or woman learns to wrest the truth from unlikely and undependable sources. That's what this whole movie is about. The writer-director, Jonathan Levine, is no master of pacing and contrast, but the period music on the soundtrack gives the film some hip and hop, and his quester's soul breaks through the meandering narrative.
