Lerman in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

In a compilation of life’s most painful and punishing experiences, I would put high school at the top of the list. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, adapted by writer-director Stephen Chbosky from his best-selling novel about freshman year at a Pittsburgh high school in 1991, is a structurally messy but emotionally effective coming of age movie that gets a lot of it right. High school is an ordeal only the fittest can survive.

Every inaugural freshman embarking on the first day of this new adventure suffers the same anxiety, frustration and fear of the unknown, but for gawky, 15-year-old misfit Charlie (Logan Lerman), the terror is especially acute. “Only 1,305 days left,” is how he describes his first day at Mill Grove High School, surrounded by hostility. Charlie is a shy, brilliant, introverted loner with a history of mental illness who is still haunted by his best friend’s suicide. Withdrawn and self-effacing, he rarely looks anyone in the eye and never raises his hand in class; he knows all the answers to the questions, but is too self-conscious to answer them. Encouraged by his English teacher (Paul Rudd), Charlie saves his intelligence for extra-credit book reports on The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird. Despite a supportive father (Dylan McDermott), and an understanding shrink (Joan Cusack), his real grounding comes from new friends, a close-knit group of seniors who are older and more experienced, power-driven by an oddball duo of quirky siblings who march to a different drummer: sexually precocious Sam (Emma Watson, paroled at last from her ingenue prison as Hermione in the Harry Potter flicks) and her flamboyantly gay stepbrother Patrick (weirdo Ezra Miller, who played the schizophrenic teenage killer in the dreadful We Need To Talk About Kevin). “Welcome to the island of misfit toys,” says Sam, his first friend, and Charlie falls instantly in love. But Sam likes slushy rock ballads like “Pearly Dewdrops Drop,” and older guys who treat her like dirt. So does her brother, who wears drag in a parody of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (the only movie the students ever seem to watch) and is secretly having a torrid affair with the football team’s closeted star quarterback. Under their guidance, Charlie innocently takes his first baby steps into the world of drugs and loses his virginity to an overweight Buddhist vamp who introduces him to Billie Holiday and foreign films. In the end, Charlie is the one who straightens out their lives.

Well-intentioned but lazy, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an honest if familiar look at kids that doesn’t cover a lot of fresh ground about teenage angst. Mr. Chbosky’s teenagers discover Jack Kerouac and J. D. Salinger, smoke their first joints and fumble with their zippers just like we did when I was in school. In addition to the same coveted football letter jackets, pot brownies, pop quizzes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and a Top-40 DJ mix at prom, you can now add gay sex, homophobia, cafeteria violence and nervous breakdowns. Unfortunately, Mr. Chbosky’s “techniques” wear thin fast—corny voiceovers, flashbacks and a “secret” from Charlie’s past that arrives so late in the third act it seems purely artificial. The narrative meanders and the soundtrack is so drenched in bubblegum pop that it sounds like an iTunes library. (If I hear one more dated period piece by The Smiths, I’ll scream.) On the plus side, Mr. Chbosky shows genuine affection for his characters, providing them with small, reflective moments as well as big, fervent outbursts, and with his cast, this is as it should be. Emma Watson’s Sam has the same face as her old signature character Hermione, but her chopped-off Edie Sedgwick hair, cleavage and curves leave the moppet warlocks at Hogwarts in the dust. It is the remarkable Logan Lerman who negotiates his journey to Charlie’s self-discovery with so much dignity and vulnerability that he steals every scene and carries the picture. As the young George Hamilton in My One and Only (2009), he dazzled. He’s come a long way as an actor since then, if you don’t count his misguided D’Artagnan in last year’s crummy high-tech remake of The Three Musketeers, and he shows signs of a rock-solid future. He does a Herculean job of tempering the joy and elation of adolescence with the dark confusion of youth in transition that makes The Perks of Being a Wallflower ingratiating, if not memorable.

rreed@observer.com

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

Running Time 103 minutes

Written and Directed by Stephen Chbosky

Starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson and Ezra Miller

2.5/4

Ezra Miller in Comme Des Garcons (Paper Magazine)

Two weeks ago, 19-year-old actor Ezra Miller gave Out Magazine a "candid" interview and revealed that he was homosexual. Sort of.

We're not sure if the small amount of fanfare that trumpeted this admission was due to our culture's gradual acceptance of alternative sexualities, or because anyone who has seen Mr. Miller outside of a movie would find it weirder if the Perks of Being a Wallflower actor announced he was straight.

From Out:

“I’m queer,” he says, simply. “I have a lot of really wonderful friends who are of very different sexes and genders. I am very much in love with no one in particular. I’ve been trying to figure out relationships, you know? I don’t know if it’s responsible for kids of my age to be so aggressively pursuing monogamous binds, because I don’t think we’re ready for them. The romanticism within our culture dictates that that’s what you’re supposed to be looking for. Then [when] we find what we think is love -- even if it is love -- we do not yet have the tools. I do feel that it’s possible to be at this age unintentionally hurtful, just by being irresponsible -- which is fine. I’m super down with being irresponsible. I’m just trying to make sure my lack of responsibility no longer hurts people. That’s where I’m at in the boyfriend/girlfriend/zefriend type of question.”

It's not that Mr. Miller identifying as "queer" is strange...it's that he's identifying at all. He's such a (very) young, bizarrely awesome technicolor dream coat of weirdness that we expect he falls somewhere between "Space Alien" and "Magic Raccoon" on the Kinsey Scale. "Candid" doesn't really come to mind reading that interview. "Crazy-ish" does.

That's the term Stephen Chbosky's uses to describe Mr. Miller in Paper Magazine's recent article accompanying a giant cross-dressing photo spread. It should be noted that both Out and Paper published their profiles on the same day; Paper makes no note of Mr. Miller's sexuality, except that he was "game to play gay" as Patrick in Wallflower. Which really must have chafed Paper's editors.

And although The Perks of Being a Wallflower writer feels the need to qualify his admission--"What I mean is, that boy is lightning in a bottle. And I don't know if the bottle could ever be big enough for him."-- this is not so much a revelation as it is a "Sure, why not?"
After all, this is the boy who once answered the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with "A red pillar." He wants sentient, evil jellyfish to invade Earth. When asked if he identified with real life characters, responded, "No. Not Vanilla Ice."

One time, Ezra Miller showed The Observer what was in his pockets after a movie screening. It was a rubber frog. He was wearing small antlers as a necklace. (Though both those items are also noted in Paper's piece, so maybe we're the dupes.)

On another occasion, he showed up for a Q&A at the Angelika in a giant blue fur coat with a walking cane. Ezra Miller is a flamboyant freak show...and we mean that in the best way possible. His sexuality--which, knowing Mr. Miller's fickle and strange responses to the press, might change by the time he gets another profile--is probably the least interesting thing about him. Ezra Miller's most identifying trait is that he's a teenager. And teenagers are weird.

Now, if only he stays on the "quirky" side of the fence and doesn't fall face-first into the (James) Francophelia of pseudo-intellectual "Look at me! I'm so weird!" meta-crap, he'll be fine.

Tilda Swinton, we need to talk. (Getty Images)

Articles about the film We Need to Talk About Kevin highlighting the involvement of actress Tilda Swinton:

Time: "We Need To Talk About Tilda Swinton."

W: "We Need To Talk About Tilda."

San Jose Mercury-News: "We Need To Talk About Piper, Tilda."

BBC America: "We Need To Talk About Tilda Swinton."

Lovefilm.com: "We Need To Talk About Tilda."

...highlighting the involvement of actor Ezra Miller:

New York Post: "We Need To Talk About Ezra."

New York: "We Need To Talk About Ezra."

Dazed & Confused online: "We Need To Talk About... Ezra Miller."

...highlighting the involvement of director Lynne Ramsay:

Lede of SlashFilm article: "Forgive me, but we need to talk about Lynne Ramsay."

Emerald Street: "We Need To Talk About Lynne."

Movies.com: "We Need To Talk About Lynne Ramsay."

...and a sentence highlighting awards prospects:

From TheWrap.com: "The undercurrent of the talk on the streets, of course, had to do with another troublesome male figure: We need to talk about Oscar."

daddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Ezra Miller in We Need to Talk About Kevin

On a frosty Friday night at the Angelika, the 7:30 showing of We Need to Talk About Kevin was sold out. As we scooted towards an empty seat in the back, we wondered what could possibly account for such a large crowd for a non-premiere of the Lionel Shriver adaptation.

After the disturbing, somewhat fractured retelling of a young sociopath (played at different life stages by Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller) and his ice queen mother (Tilda Swinton), we found out: as the lights went up, a lanky figure in a full-length fur-coat traipsed the length of the stage and was introduced for a Q&A session. Ezra Miller was going to be taking our questions for the evening.

Mr. Miller, already cutting a flamboyant figure at only 19, opened up the conversation by saying he wouldn't be offended if anyone would rather go out and have a stiff drink rather than talk.

Did Mr. Miller think that the John C. Reilly character might not have been his father?

"I've never read it that way," said the star. (Neither did we, nor for that matter, anyone who had read the book on which it was based.) "But your free to your interpretation."

How much time did the young actor--whose next role will be playing in another troubled teen adaptation for the highly anticipated Perks of Being a Wallflower--spend with the two actors who played younger versions of himself?

"Jasper and I spent a lot of time in what must have been the weirdest play-date ever," said Mr. Miller. "We had a 'Kevin Room,' and no one else was allowed in. We'd talk about how to build weapons and how much we hated our mothers. If anyone tried to come in, we'd throw things at them."

Another viewer said that she was worried that film might inspire copycat serial killers. Was that something Mr. Miller ever took into consideration when shooting?

"Um, I hope not," Mr. Miller said, laughing. "If anyone shows up to school with a bow and arrow wearing a We Need to Talk About Kevin t-shirt, that would be really awful."

At the recent New York premiere of We Need To Talk About Kevin, a scruffy looking kid with thrift store apparel and long-unattended to hair, told The Observer of the decision he’s made to never play a character  he doesn’t deem “honest”. We had just seen him depict an intense psychological battle with his on screen mother, Tilda Swinton, which concluded in the most unforgiving of ways.

Ezra Miller, the young man in question, is promoting not just We Need To Talk About Kevin but also Another Happy Day. In both films, he plays troubled teenagers, giving performances so convincing that he is now in danger of being typecast as the troubled young mind of psychological indie films. What happens once he’s traversed the murky waters of adolescence and appearance, alone, prevents him from performing such roles?

“I’ve been holding out. I am reading a lot of scripts but saying no to a lot too. I think it pays off to wait for the right one," he told us, while sipping a latte at one of the holographic tables of Yaffa Café, on St Mark’s Place. He spoke to The Observer, about the “sacrifices made by artists” – because of the choice between all round commercial success and personal fulfilment. Right now they co-exist for him, although, he’s conscious “there will be times in the future that are difficult.”

The hype surrounding the 18-year-old actor, suggests an inevitability to his success. Born and schooled in New Jersey, he dropped out of education at 16, a decision that he describes as “a necessity”.

“I was an outsider because I had these endeavours that took place away from what is primarily an insular place”. He offered, with a strong self-awareness that is prevalent in his work. “One of the things I appreciate about acting is this process of rediscovery, after you strip yourself down to your most basic form, in order to inhabit another person.”

On the surface, it appears that he can empathize with the troubled minds he portrays. It must be true that he connected with the character of Kevin, at the very least saw an “honesty” in the role to have taken it. Looking at his IMDB, complex and ultimately threatening characters are the most honest ones, to Mr. Miller.

“When I was seven I had this increasing want for horror. My Dad would read me things like Stephen King. I remember being completely fascinated by Edgar Allen Poe because I found his collection. His whole life was about loss. I would definitely play him…As soon as I’ve worked on my moustache.“

So would he find it easier to connect with real-life characters, we wondered?

“No. Not Vanilla Ice," he said, calling to mind the unlikeliest candidate he could. "I cannot find anywhere in me, any sense of connection with Vanilla Ice. I just think, you know, what was he doing for all those years?”

Mr. Miller's indie cred does not stop at films, however. At the age of six, he landed a role in the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s opera, White Raven, and he is now a drummer and singer in the Americana / Black Metal / Soul Band, ‘Sons of an Illustrious Father’, who have just released their second full-length album.

Band member and childhood companion of the actor-cum-singer, Lilah Larson, described the difficult time he faced in adolescence. “I've known Ezra to have many struggles but luckily, he's the type of person who uses pain well, who lets the breaking open be a growing.” She told The Observer via email.

In June this year, Mr. Miller was charged “…with disorderly conduct. That’s all,” he interrupted.

He was in possession of 20 grams of Marijuana, whilst the passenger in a fellow actors car. “I had pot on my lap, pot on the floor, on the seat. There was pot everywhere," he recalled. Rather than being concerned with public image or future job prospects, he took a more worldly approach to the charge. “The one thing that I learned from that was about the interaction between police and media," he mused. "There’s this chief of police who’s ringing up the papers to tell them about some person of interest ‘s wrongdoing.”

“I paid the fine in cash just to make my point.”

This seems to slot in nicely with the polarized nature of Mr. Miller’s life.  He is young and has strong opinions, he believes in equality, has natural urges to be a participator and lives in Chelsea—a description that reads like a recruitment ad for Occupy Wall Street, and he was at Zucotti Park on the day they got evicted.

“We were at the Another Happy Day party, standing on the roof of The Standard, having a cigarette with Julian Schnabel. Like, this was a great time. Then we all got a message, because we’re on the mailing list, saying Zuccotti Park is being evicted. So we ran out of the party and went down to the park. We hadn’t been there two minutes when one of my friends got hit with a shield. Lilah got punched and tear gassed and Eamon, who is also in the film, got put in jail and denied access to his essential medication.”

Would he entertain a part in OWS The Movie, we asked? “Oh man. I’d have to read the script first. I don’t know whose writing that.”

Mr. Miller is in constant search of ways to break himself down and build himself back up, in the tradition of his predecessors. In fact, there is a long list of names before him, many of who have succumbed to mental illness by method acting. Outside the cafe, whilst taking quick drags of a rolled up cigarette he offered us a thought, Mr. Miller expounded on the way we live now.

“People in America will always choose the things that kill them fastest," he thought aloud. "Filterless cigarettes, pizza, Justin Beiber. “ Pausing to contemplate, he added, “Justin Beiber is a murderer.”

Soon after the interview we spoke with Ms. Larson about her band-mate, perhaps voicing some unwitting bias. “There is a public myth of Ezra as this dark devilish guy. He does have a lot of demons, as do we all, but he's also a lot of the time the funnest, funniest, most adorable, cuddly, playful guy.”

As an actor, Mr. Miller admires Phillip Seymour Hoffmann, who has progressed through a wide range of roles in a long established career. “I’m always seeking to push myself and strip myself down more and more every time.”  And it feels as though, if he chooses the right scripts, he could well have a long career ahead of him too. Certainly something Ms. Larson agrees with:

“The acceleration that's going on right now is something that's been in Ezra's life for a long time, a sort of inevitability. This was always going to happen. He was always going to do great things.”

Mr. Miller seems old before his time, both in his work and at home (or at Yaffa to be more precise).  He is eloquent and curious, reading about quantum physics on his evenings off. He doesn’t like parties and would prefer to go to an event where “everyone knew why they were there.” But he is also refreshingly young, with teenage confusion that far surpasses his generation.

“The first phone call with my Mom after this intense month of inhabiting Kevin was so soothing, so comforting, to have that idea of myself again.”

He has just finished filming The Perks of Being A Wallflower, in which he plays a senior in high school who shows “an introvert freshman…the real world.” In the future he aims to keep pushing himself.  So surely playing Vanilla Ice will be the pinnacle of his career?

He laughs, gradually becoming pensive. “Yeah. I suppose that’s the aim.”

hkrempels@observer.com

Ms. Swinton and Mr. Reilly.

We Need to Talk About Kevin. Why? I’d rather just ignore him—and this vile, pretentious movie—completely. With an incomprehensible script and jigsaw-puzzle direction, both by Scottish poseur Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher), and a loopy performance by weirdo Tilda Swinton as the half-mad mother of a serial killer, this is the most unwatchable horror movie masquerading as social comment I have seen this year.

It begins in a laughable parody of Dante’s Inferno with a mob of scantily clad people at a Spanish bacchanal writhing in what looks like strawberry sauce. I guess they symbolize Kevin’s victims—dead bodies rolling in blood after he has shot up his school, leaving them in a vat of red paint. Kevin is a maniac who was born evil. As a baby, he screamed uncontrollably. As a child, he was senselessly drawn to maiming and hurting other children without provocation. Uncommunicative to the point of autism, he mainly just stared maniacally, saying nothing. Composed of brief images, like shards of broken milk bottles, the film takes forever for the pieces to form some kind of picture of what’s going on, and even then, some of the pieces never fit. While Kevin’s father Franklin (John C. Reilly) just shrugs and prays for adolescence, his mother Eva (Ms. Swinton, looking more anemic and androgynous than usual, which is saying a mouthful) is not so pulled together herself. When he refuses to take part in toilet training, she throws her son against the wall and breaks his arm. Then, after Kevin sprays an entire room with graffiti, Mom buys a dozen broken eggs, cooks them up in a bowl and picks at the scattered shells before papering another entire room in road maps. We won’t go into the part where Kevin stuffs his pets down the garbage disposal and flips the switch.

Far from an insightful psychological study, the movie jolts back and forth in 20-year time frames as it follows the shocked expressions of the traumatized mother of a psychopath. Mr. Reilly is nothing more than a domestic cipher as the clueless father. Ms. Swinton acts like she’s auditioning for Medea, but any hint of Greek tragedy is ratcheted up to the duh level by Ezra Miller’s snarling, absurdly precocious and profoundly obnoxious bad-seed portrait of Kevin as a cross between a Stepford baby and Chucky the killer doll. Most of the bloated running time of nearly two hours is used up before we even find out the horrible thing Kevin did at 16 that landed him in prison. Even then, the director refuses to show his murder spree, opting instead for splashing the screen with buckets of corny, symbolic paint the color of cherry tomatoes.

It’s a deliberate example of style over content that leaves you feeling like you’ve been had. Whether it’s about the toxic life of Kevin, whose contempt for everyone and everything around him leads to a homicidal massacre, or about the complicity of a sociopath’s lost, anxiety-riddled mother whose unconditional love played its part in the creation of a monster? She’s more concerned with what the neighbors think. And why all the close-ups of cancer cells? Does it mean that in an age of feminist-distopia Kevin is his mother’s own fatal disease? Does anybody care? We’ve had a lot of films about American school shootings, including Gus Van Sant’s inert and deadly Elephant, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and last year’s wrenching, underrated Beautiful Boy with Michael Sheen and Maria Bello. But We Need to Talk About Kevin (wanna bet?) is a morbid, misguided mess with a fractured narrative, guaranteed to drive audiences away in droves.

rreed@observer.com

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Running Time 112 minutes

Written by Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and Ezra Miller

0/4

Opening the iron doors to the foyer, we were greeted by a solitary publicist, placed behind a desk, monotonously flicking through her guest-list. Meanwhile, an older, red-haired lady with a sense of importance and a crutch traversed the foyer looking for any sign of life.

Were we at the right place? Had we got the right time? Was there such a thing as Another Happy Day?

Our inquiries were met with a reassuring smile and a gentle nudge downstairs, where the red carpet had been positioned. A pack of snap-happy photographers seemed just as eager as us to begin the scheduled celebrations. They lifted their lenses at the sight of The Observer’s entrance, only to fall once they realized we were not the star they were looking for.

Then out of the corner of our eye, we saw the fledglings of the film, child actors Dan Yeltsky and Shaun Rodgers, purchasing buckets full of popcorn. Just a quick conversation with them showed that these two had "clicked," since working together. "I think what Dan is saying is...he's like a little brother to me now," began Mr. Rodgers.

"He clarifies what I say," said Mr. Yeltsky.

As we talked, the rest of the cast came in, met by a similarly dull reception to the one we had endured. The sense of anti-climax was further cemented as director Sam Levinson wouldn't talk to us and the rest of the cast rushed, like children just home from school, into their co-stars' arms. The film has received a lot of attention since Sundance and we surmised that this demure affair could be a display of the collective weariness towards the project.

The Yeltsky/Rodgers duo took time to describe the film for the us. "It's different. In a good way."

Parker Posey provided some much needed insight. The actress who admitted she "doesn't know anything about the film," offered "But Christmas comes right after Halloween."

The press wanted two people—premiere host Julianne Moore and the movie's star Ezra Miller. Neither arrived and there was a growing feeling of impatience. Ms. Moore was delayed at a film set and wouldn't be joining until after the screening. Mr. Miller was late too. So we waited, chatting with friends and family of the cast as well as other well-wishing art-types, none of whom knew anything about the film.

Artist turned filmmaker Julian Schabel, who was dressed in painting overalls offset with a smart jacket, spoke about the premiere he (and we) went to the previous night for My Week With Marilyn. He described Michelle Williams's performance as "off-the-chart brilliant."

Buoyed by the (admirably late) entrance of the star of Mr. Miller, we craned our necks to get him in view...but it was Lorenzo Martone, a mistake that we imagine has never been made before. The impersonator dodged the press when Miller himself entered the hall. Smiling and collected, Mr. Miller, who has two premieres on consecutive nights, both of which see him play a malevolent son in a complex family setup, responded with due poise to our question: Are you in danger of being typecast?

"Yes," he said. "I think all actors are in great danger of being pigeonholed. There is an unfortunate tendency to cast an actor in a role you know he can do...I'm not happy about it."

So what is your ideal role?

"Edgar Allen Poe, the dark years," he said. "When I grow a moustache, I'm after Poe."

A party at the rooftop bar of The Standard followed the quiet screening -- a venue that could be seen as over the top—but celebrations of the film continued into the night with some uncharacteristically lively dancing. In the end we even learned that the lady with a crutch, who greeted us on our entrance, was in fact the mother of actress, Ellen Barkin.

Barkin.

Back to the darkness of wedding-bell blues. Another Happy Day is another strained comedy about another dysfunctional family, but with some fine performances by a stellar ensemble of first-cabin performers that are definitely worth applauding. Despite the obvious comparisons to Jonathan Demme’s sprightly Rachel Getting Married, Noah Baumbach’s dreadful Margot at the Wedding and a dozen other movies about how weddings bring out the worst in everybody, this one does mark an auspicious feature debut by a very talented writer-director, Sam Levinson, whose career is totally worth keeping an eye on.

I tend to forget how marvelous Ellen Barkin can be until she gets the rare chance to pull out all the stops in a movie like this. She should work more often. In Another Happy Day, she plays Lynn, an affluent but deeply neurotic mother of four on the way to her parents’ Chesapeake Bay estate in Annapolis for the elaborate garden wedding of her eldest son, Dylan, whom she was never allowed to raise, with two of her younger boys by a second marriage in tow. Handsome, clean-cut Dylan (Michael Nardelli) is the sanest member of the family, which is probably why he has the smallest role in the picture, but which also explains the hurt Lynn feels for being denied the privilege of watching him grow up. Instead, her middle son, Elliot (Ezra Miller), is a 17-year-old drug addict with a chemical imbalance, Tourette’s disease and a fondness for wearing lipstick, who spends half his time getting thrown out of every important school in the country and the other half in rehab. Youngest son Ben (Daniel Yelsky), who has been diagnosed with autism and Asberger’s, has brought his video camera along and drives everyone crazy filming everything they say and do. Their father is Lee (Jeffrey DeMunn), an odd, retro character who lives in the past and loves Connie Francis records. Dylan and his sister, Alice (Kate Bosworth), have a different father, Paul (Thomas Haden Church), Lynn’s ex-husband, who is also coming to the wedding, to Lynn’s mounting horror, with his other children and his bitchy, resentful, emotionally charged second wife, Patty (Demi Moore). Everyone fears the worst from estranged, psychopathic daughter Alice, who has not seen Paul for seven years and is so severely manic-depressive she slices away at her body with a straight razor.

When this train wreck descends upon the family home, Lynn finds herself submerged in something not unlike EC comic books’ “Crypt of Terror,” surrounded by her two hateful sisters and their families, her own father, Joe (George Kennedy), a near-catatonic stroke victim with dementia who has to be watched carefully or he’ll wander off on the riding lawnmower into the unknown, and her mother, Doris (Ellen Burstyn), the long-suffering family matriarch who doesn’t like, trust or understand any of them. Elliot immediately steals his grandfather’s morphine and knocks himself out. During the rest of the weekend, tensions erupt and old animosities surface, leading to panic attacks and fist fights, while the irritating brat Ben gets it all on camera. Skeletons come piling out of the closets as an army of tertiary characters implode and the audience tries to figure out why they are so unhinged, angry and self-destructive in the first place. You get a gumbo of confusion about Paul and Patty, who raised Dylan but turned their backs on Alice, first and second husbands of Lynn’s, older and younger children by Paul and Lynn, two younger children by Lee, and Alice, who doesn’t fit in anywhere. With all the siblings, stepchildren, in-laws and cousins, it’s hard to keep them straight. These are the kind of people who meet life’s most traumatic challenges with “Whatever.” Eventually, their whining insecurities take their toll and you find it difficult to care about any of them.

Characters jump through a few of the predictable hoops we’ve come to expect from this genre. The wedding scene itself drags, and since I didn’t really find any of the characters lovable, I couldn’t wait for it to end, but even when the movie lags, you can’t look away or you’ll miss something vital in the quality of Ms. Barkin’s polished, quirky performance. Fortunately, Mr. Levinson is a careful writer-director, his dialogue is fresh enough to keep things moving (Elliot, describing his grandpa: “He watches Fox News while he sleeps—that’s like the textbook definition of zombie”), and he wisely gives each of his actors a moving monologue or a similar moment of depth that serves as a mirror to their characters’ souls. He paints them neither black nor white but honest and believable, fleshing out the gray in between. Ms. Burstyn reveals so much truth in her eyes that she is riveting, even when she isn’t even speaking. The family dynamics in the story end up stronger than the occasional speed bumps in the script and the good work outweighs the imperfections. It’s good to see so much talent and feeling in one movie, and Another Happy Day has plenty of it.

rreed@observer.com

ANOTHER HAPPY DAY

Running Time 119 minutes

Written and directed by Sam Levinson

Starring Ellen Barkin, Ezra Miller and Kate Bosworth

3/4

The Last Play at Shea traces the history of Shea Stadium (lovingly called a "dump" by former players and fans) from when it was a glint in Robert Moses' eye to the arrival of The Beatles to the Miracle Mets in 1969 to Bill Buckner in 1986 to even September 11. It's a powerful threadline for a stadium and franchise that always played also-ran to their more successful older brothers in the Bronx. And along the way, we're treated to the rise of Mr. Joel's career: From his humble beginnings on Long Island to his marriage to supermodel Christie Brinkley and beyond.

The best documentaries—for example, Joan Rivers — A Piece of Work—put their subjects under the microscope to see and inspect the warts. Mr. Crowder, though, too often treats Mr. Joel with kid gloves. Not that it needed to be some tabloid blotter, but there is barely a mention of his missteps and transgressions over the last decade. And since the last half of the film is almost solely about Mr. Joel, the narrative conflict is lost; by the time Paul McCartney shows up to surprise the audience during the concert—let it be known that Sir Paul can still give you goosebumps even now—the film has become something akin to a Time-Life infomercial. The Last Play at Shea is great fun, but too often the great documentary it could have been isn't on the screen.

Mr. Goluboff's directorial debut, Beware the Gonzo, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last night, and it immediately feels like the type of late-summer indie sleeper that audiences seem to love buying tickets for. Set around an underground high-school newspaper run by the Hunter S. Thompson–loving "Gonzo" Gillman (Ezra Miller, who undoubtedly watched Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men for inspiration), the film tries to be some genre-bending polemic on the newspaper industry—there are debates over the viability of print versus online!—but it has a little too much in common with every other teen comedy you've seen in the past five years. To wit: The slutty girl isn't really a slut, the nerd is a Casanova, the evil jock has major insecurities; it's been done before and done better.

Thankfully, though, the charming cast is around to save things when Mr. Goluboff's sentimental script fails. Mr. Miller recalls Emile Hirsch from the always-underrated The Girl Next Door, and Zoe Kravitz (yes, that Kravitz) is beautiful and tough with a genuine streak of vulnerability as the girl he loves. But the breakout comes from Griffin Newman as—for real—"Horny" Rob Becker, the type of geek that would count McLovin' among his heroes. Beware the Gonzo isn't a great movie—though the home-team crowd at the premiere ate it up; it felt like the positive, "you can do it!" vibe someone would get from sitting at a school recital—but at least it's a good time.

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for Mat Whitecross' sex & drugs & rock & roll. One of the more buzzy films at this year's Tribeca, the musical biopic of New Wave singer Ian Dury is like its subject: loud, obnoxious, annoying, exhausting and berating. By the time this mess was through, my head was pounding. Just as formulaic as Beware the Gonzo, Mr. Whitecross' film fails because he doesn't have the slightest clue how to use his talented cast (among the wasted: Toby Jones, Ray Winstone, Olivia Williams) and hits every Behind the Music–worthy beat with the subtly of a highway construction crew. Andy Serkis stars as Mr. Dury, and while he's certainly committed—it even looked like he did his own singing!—the tics and snarls of the performance draw an unavoidable comparison to his work as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. That's not a good thing; neither is this movie. There was even a walk-out at the press screening (though maybe the girl just had to use her cell phone). Avoid at all costs.