The Wackness (2008)

OMFG! They have already made a 90’s nostalgia movie. This is a film about a teenager in the summer of 1994 in New York City. I was a teenager in 1994 in New York City. Dude, do I feel old!

The Wackness is a historical period piece centered on a teenage boy circa 1994. It is another coming of age film. There has to be, like, ten a year, but unlike Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite, and Juno, which are basically the same movie, where the audience sees a quirky and somehow brilliant lead character , and how the world reacts to him or her, this one is pre-Wes Anderson, Old Skool, where the teenage character is the only sane person in a sea or crazy or shallow people around them.

This is not a happy drug film a la Harold and Kumar. Instead this is a moody and sometimes dark feature where the character has some seriously instabilities in his life. His parents are losing their apartment and he might have to live with his grandparents in New Jersey. He has graduated High School and had gotten into his safety college. The only support he has is Hip-hop, which provides a false persona that he has control of his life, which is really has no control over anything at all. The only personal support he has is a therapist whom is pays in drugs. He tries to take care of his family by trying to sell enough drugs to save his home.

Our hero’s name is Luke.

A social outcast and loner, people his age, who are mostly lost, bored, and wealthy kids (like from the movie Kids) are only interested in him for the drugs. He does meet one girl, Stephanie; Juno’s honest-to-blog friend played by Olivia Thirlby. Stephanie is uses Luke mainly because she is bored and Luke is a distraction.

In the end, everything falls apart for Luke, but somehow like every teenage films, he will survive. I guess, such films are a solute the resiliency to an age group that knows much drama real or imaginary.

A tribute to the nineties, The Wackness drops as much nineties references that it can per second of screen time. Whether it be a Zima, biggie Smalls, or having Mary-Kate Olsen who seems like a living relic under 30 years old, the film never lets you forget the time period. Sadly in the pre-9/11 movie the CGI World Trade Center towers they get wrong. Maybe the outsourced the work. The towers don’t look right. They look shorter and fatter than the original structures looked.

Overall, the movie is rather depressing. The characters, all of them, are lost. Despite the fact that these types of people are plentiful in New York City, they are not the majority; nor do represent life and vivaciousness of the time, especially in the nineties.