Title: The Spectacular Now

Opens: August 2, 2013

This movie, which embraces some wonderful performances by both adults and high-school kids, should prove a draw for all ages and might just remind some of us who are years beyond their student days of our own successes and misses way back when. The young people in general are having such fun that it’s a shame to see what might happen to them twenty, thirty years down the pike, as some of the parents who are on exhibit appear well beyond the kinds of life they dreamed about.

“The Spectacular Now” is directed by James Ponsoldt, a double Ivy-League graduate (Yale and Columbia), whose “Smashed” last year is about a couple who share a love of alcohol until the woman decides to become sober. No question: Ponsoldt is in his métier with his current offering, in which alcohol is so prominent it should get a credit as one of the supporting actors. Like “Smashed,” more or less, it’s about a life-of-the-party type, an alcoholic high-school senior who corrupts his formerly innocent girlfriend, turns her into a lush like him, but who is later faced with a woman who becomes sober and sees the futility of continuing to hook up with the lad.

Played winningly with terrific chemistry by Miles Teller as Sutter Keely and Shailene Woodley as his freckle-faced, sci-fi novel-loving girlfriend Aimee Finicky, Ponsoldt’s movie is based on a novel by Tim Tharp. As Publishers Weekly says about the book, “Sutter describes his lurching from one good time to the next: he carries whiskey in a flask, and once it’s mixed into his 7Up, anything is possible. He will jump into the pool fully clothed, climb up a tree and onto his ex-girlfriends roof or cruise around all hours of the night.” Sutter lives entirely in the present, a favored stance according to some New Age types but one that’s self-defeating for him. Having lost his last girl, the sophisticated Cassidy (Brie Larson), he concentrates on “liberating” Aimee, a virgin who had never enjoyed the company of a boyfriend but who thinks mightily of her future as a college grad making a contribution to society. The two do not get together because of their completely different philosophies of life but only because Sutter Keely, a “D” student in geometry, opens her up to the pleasures of an intimate relationship.

There’s little doubt that Sutter developed his love for the bottle from his hapless dad (Kyle Chandler), who left Sutter’s mother some time back after cheating on her and who is on a daily alcoholic binge with his loser pals three hours away. Sutter’s mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) does not even want to give the dad’s address, but after several years of living his life without the benefit of his father’s advice, Sutter travels to meet a man he does not know.

Two thirds of this film looks like a fairly generic high-school pic but the final segment is riveting. Watch particularly for Aimee’s expression when she is visited at her Philadelphia college by Sutter, whom she had once loved. If this movie falls short of being as spectacular as its title, it deserves attention from a broad potential audience.

Rated R. 95 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B+