THE SPECTACULAR NOW (James Ponsoldt). 95 minutes. Opens Friday ( August 16). For venues and times, see listings.
The Spectacular Now is being hailed as the best high-school movie in a while. I’d hedge on that it doesn’t really fit into the genre, and didn’t anyone else see The Perks Of Being A Wallflower? But it’s a terrific movie about teenagers, and that should be enough.
It traces the tender romance between two Georgia teens, Sutter (Rabbit Hole’s Miles Teller) and Aimee (The Descendants’ Shailene Woodley), who meet cute when she finds him on a lawn after a drunken night and helps him locate his missing car.
They start dating – and he starts her drinking – and together they edge tentatively toward what lies beyond the end of high school, which is inevitably complicated by matters of family, grades and self-image. And the booze doesn’t help any of that.
Director James Ponsoldt explored alcoholism narratives in Off The Black and last year’s Smashed, but he isn’t out to repeat himself. He approaches The Spectacular Now as a completely different film, focusing almost entirely on Sutter and Aimee together as their relationship slowly changes them from the inside out.
Teller and Woodley are terrific at portraying those moments of unexpected growth, and Teller particularly shines at revealing flashes of Sutter’s emotional mechanisms and then snatching them back. The Spectacular Now would be a very different movie without him.
