Youth in Revolt Blu-ray Review
Michael Cera plays both Michael Cera and a cigarette-smoking Frenchman with a mustache and an
uncanny resemblance to Michael Cera.
Reviewed by Martin Liebman, May 26, 2010
My one and only love needs me to be bad.
It's that time again. Another Michael Cera film has found its way onto celluloid, this one -- again
--
featuring Hollywood's latest golden child playing the same character he always portrays, but with a
twist. He's a lovably shy and babe-less dweeb, the sort one would expect to wear a "kick me" sign
on
his back all the way through high school, a guy that's all brains and no brawn and, perhaps most
importantly, shy a backbone. That all changes in
Youth in Revolt -- sort of. Cera does
indeed play Cera, but in tow is an alter ego that fills in those gaps and turns him into a hybrid
human being that's two parts aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart and one part James Dean rebel, if James
Dean were a mustache-wearing, cigarette-smoking Frenchman, that is. Unfortunately,
Youth
in
Revolt doesn't escape that Michael Cera vibe, even for all its efforts to allow the actor to play
somebody else. There's
just something about all the Cera movies; despite different characters and changing stories, they
all look, feel, sound, and seem to play out with very little in the way of substantial tonal
differences.
Youth in Revolt is no different; even the dual Ceras don't seem all
that different beyond the superficialities, and the result is an uneven picture's that's sometimes
funny, occasionally boring, and Michael Cera through and through.
 
Michael Michael Motorcycle.
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Teenager Nick Twisp (Cera) is like most other guys his age: he's got a lusting for girls, but that's
pretty much where the similarities begin and end. Unlike the high school jocks who watch
The Hills Have Eyes 2
and actually get the girl, Nick watches foreign films from the Criterion Collection, listens to Frank
Sinatra, and, yes, he's still a virgin. When his mother's boyfriend is forced to flee from a trio of
angry sailors
over a botched used car sale, the makeshift family heads off on an impromptu vacation to Clear
Lake and the cozy confines of a run-down trailer. Like it was meant to be, Nick immediately
meets the lovely Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) who happens to like foreign films, listens to
old music on vinyl, and shuns her parents' hardcore religious beliefs. It's not long before Nick
makes it to second base, but he's denied a round-tripper when his mom and her boyfriend decide
it's
time to go back home. Nick and Sheeni devise a scheme to ensure his return, a scheme that
involves Nick dropping his clean-cut persona in favor of a make-believe alter ego who's everything
Nick isn't: confident, strong, quick to retort, unafraid to speak his mind, and most importantly, a
rebel with a cause: sex. With Nick Twisp successfully transformed into Francois Dillinger (also
played by Cera), it's only
a matter of time before the two lovebirds will be reunited -- assuming there are no unintended
consequences along the way back to Clear Lake.
Maybe it's time to just make "Michael Cera" a genre unto itself -- kind of like an "Arnold movie."
Indeed, Schwarzenegger never could escape his persona even though he branched out into
several different genres and with great success; whether playing a futuristic cyborg, a
skilled soldier, a man with an identity crisis, an ancient warrior, a kindergarten teacher, or a
pregnant
man, his pictures always seemed to capture similar vibes due in large part to the Austrian Oak's
unmistakable personality. Likewise, Cera seems like a one-trick pony if the characters he plays in
every film are any indication. Whether
Juno,
Year One, or
Youth
in Revolt, Cera's become heavily typecast and mostly within a singular genre, but at least he
does his schtick well. Cera's
character in
Youth in Revolt captures the exact same vibes, mannerisms, and speech
patterns that he's shown in every other picture he's made. Substitute his character from
Paper Heart into
Juno or his character from
Superbad into
Youth in Revolt, and general audiences probably wouldn't notice. Fortunately, Cera's got
this routine down pat, so down pat that his alter ego in
Youth in Revolt doesn't really
work. A different actor in the
alter ego role would have worked much better, as it has in
other movies of recent
vintage;
here, Cera's alter ego is, well, Cera, only with a mustache and a cigarette. He's less stiff in his
movements and he manages to change his cadence, but otherwise, it's little more than a costume
change, and not even as dramatic as the transformation in something like
She's All That.
The remainder of the cast falls under Cera's dual shadows, but relative newcomers Portia
Doubleday and Adhir Kalyan and an all-star roster of Hollywood veterans in Steve Buscemi, Fred
Willard, Ray Liotta, Justin Long, and M. Emmet Walsh alike all turn in solid performances.
Cera's cookie-cutter character aside,
Youth in Revolt takes two old concepts -- it's like
American Pie meets
Fight Club -- and meshes them together with only
occasionally successful results. One of the picture's greatest downfalls lies in its inability to craft
likable, relatable, or complexly-woven characters; like the film itself, they seem like amalgamations
built from the quirky-movie spare parts bin. Cera's is obviously unoriginal at best, and the rest of
the characters are shallow, one-dimensional façades that do little more than fill a gap in the
screenplay. Characterization takes a back seat to humor, and even the picture's jokes fall flat just
as often as they work. To its credit,
Youth in
Revolt tries to find some middle ground between genre conventions, forgoing the
excessive raunchiness of some pictures but going well beyond the limitations of family-friendly
fare.
Additionally,
Youth in Revolt has a somewhat choppy feel to it; even coming in at about
90 minutes, there are several slow stretches that add little value to the film or in any way help tell
the story. Fortunately, the special effects are so seamless that they never register in the mind as
"special effects." Those scenes featuring two Michael Cera's are positively seamless; it's just
unfortunate that "Good Cera" and "Bad Cera" both manage to come across as "Michael Cera."