Sorry Charlie

I wish Charlie Bartlett wasn’t so funny. It’d be a lot easier to dislike it that way.

Charlie Bartlett is another one of those high school “dramedies” that tries oh-so-very hard to be hip and insightful, an inspiration to the teenage experience, but instead it falls into every clichéd high school stereotype imaginable.

Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is an intelligent rich kid who has gotten kicked out of virtually every boarding school in New England, the last one for running a fake-ID service out of his dorm room. On the limo ride home, when trying to explain to his mother why he did it, he says he just wants to be popular. “There’s more to high school than being well-liked,” she says gently. “Like what?” he asks back. She looks serenely away from her son and responds, “Nothing comes to mind.”

So they put him in public school, and Charlie is soon getting into more shenanigans, immediately getting his face put in the toilet by the local homophobic leather-jacketed bully, who is called “Murph.” Charlie soon puts his smarts (and money) to good use by getting Murph subdued in the back of his limo, then tells him he’d really like to be his friend, to which Murph responds, “Guys like you and guys like me can’t be friends.”

Charlie then proposes they become “business partners,” and proceeds to get famous by selling prescription drugs out of the boys bathroom and banging the principal’s daughter, Susan (Kat Dennings). She somehow doesn’t seem to mind when a boxer-clad Charlie announces to his peers en masse that he is no longer a virgin.

I’ll stop here, but suffice it to say that the movie continues to wildly gesticulate about high school in a manner typical of those for whom it’s been a decade or so since they were in high school. The film tries for an emotional punch and misses spectacularly. By the time the third act rolls around, Charlie is giving inspirational speeches about “being your own person” and producing a student-written play called Hell Comes With Your Own Locker. Gag me with a fucking spoon.

That said, Charlie Bartlett is also stupidly hilarious. Charlie is impossible not to like as a cheeky little shit-disturber, and the ludicrous mayhem he causes with former enemy Murph succeeds on a comic level (I know my school dances would’ve been significantly improved if someone had sold Ritalin to the entire crowd). And the relationship between Charlie and his neurotic mother, while copied directly from the Wes Anderson playbook, is highly amusing at the very least. (“Wine tasting?” she asks when thinking aloud about potential bonding activities. “We haven’t done that since you were a kid.”)

But the best part of the film, and sadly the part that doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, centers around Susan, Charlie’s love interest. I always liked Kat Dennings as the smarmy daughter in 40 Year Old Virgin, and she gives her similar role here an equal amount of spunk and depth, truly shining when playing off her alcoholic gun-toting principal of a father played by Robert Downey Jr.

Their conflicted relationship is the one part of the film where the drama hits home, and the two actors breathe an extraordinary amount of humanity into their roles. If only the same could be said for the rest of the movie.

Superbad and Juno, two of the most recent acclaimed high-school movies, succeeded for simple, opposite reasons: Superbad managed verisimilitude for a plot stripped down to teenage essentials (sex, booze and best friends), and Juno took its blatant lack of verisimilitude and ran with it. But Charlie Bartlet t tries to be it all: quirky, inspiring, relatable and funny. But it’s really only funny.

Charlie Bartlett does well enough to warrant a viewing if there’s nothing else at the theater that turns your crank, and you’re in a 10 Things I Hate About You kind of a mood. Hell, if a drunken Robert Downey Jr. screaming in his bathrobe and shooting at a toy boat can’t draw some good laughs, we’re all in the wrong business.