The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

When it comes to high school-centric entertainments, the ones that most appeal to me are those that avoid overly romanticizing the teen years. Perhaps this is because I have a hard time identifying with such sentiments, but mostly I become far more invested when a film or television series admits that high school is kind of a horrible place. Take, for instance, my love of the television series Freaks and Geeks, which is almost exclusively about a select few groups of kids who are just biding their time until they can get out of high school and actually be comfortable in their own skin. The new comedy/drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower is another such entertainment; its high school is a land completely controlled by what is cool or acceptable, even among the outcasts. All is not a lost cause, of course—otherwise it would just become too depressing—but Wallflower’s most powerful and uplifting moments work because of how unflinching it is in between.

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is at first glance a typical high school movie outcast who spends much of his time reading and writing, and most nights you can find him locked in his room. However, we learn quickly that there may be some very serious, tragic reasons for his social awkwardness. His mood begins to change when he meets senior step-siblings Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller), and he spends his freshman year hanging out with them and slowly learning how to embrace high school outcasticism. (I made up that last word, if you couldn’t tell.) Charlie also develops a friendly relationship with his English teacher (Paul Rudd) and even begins dating the Buddhist Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman), but in reality all he wants is to declare his love for Sam.

Written and directed by Stephen Chbosky—who also wrote the popular 1999 book of the same name—The Perks of Being a Wallflower is as episodic as movies come. There is no single plot as much as there are several character arcs that play out in a series of vignettes. To my knowledge, the book is made up of a series of fictional essays written from Charlie’s point of view, and the film plays out in similar fashion. In less graceful hands, the film could easily have felt like it was mindlessly going from beat to beat without stitching it together into a worthwhile whole. This is why letting Chbosky make the movie himself was such an ingenious idea. He knows the material and what it’s meant to accomplish, and there’s no one else who would have worked this hard to make it work.

Chbosky’s involvement with the adaptation also had the potential to derail everything. He could have been less willing to let go of certain storylines, and sure enough there is some stuff in the finished product that probably could have been tossed aside without affecting the whole. But what he really brings to the table is a unique sincerity; one that captures all the potential joys of Charlie’s high school life while equally accentuating the horror of it all. Charlie’s situation is unusually tragic, to be sure, but Chbosky doesn’t make it so unique that no one else can relate. Charlie and his friends all have their fair share of problems, and audiences should find at least one plot or character that they can identify with. Most will have several. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a film about a specific group of people with very specific struggles, but it never stops being about a more universal high school experience.

Chbosky is also careful to keep it from becoming a '90s nostalgia trip that only applies to the generation directly above mine. The Perks of Being a Wallflower has an undeniable fondness for its era—mixtapes are brought up more times than I can count—but it just as easily could have been set in any decade. If anything, Chbosky’s setting only further captures the film’s magic. Often this movie reminded me of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, one of the more fascinating indie film stories of last year. Wallflower is not a fraction as ambitious as Lonergan’s gloriously messy epic of the adolescent mind, but it does touch on teenage egomania in some very interesting ways. After all, one of the most important aspects of any coming of age story is the realization that what happens to you at this moment is not the end of the world. Believe it or not, you are going to spend most of your life not in high school and not around these same people. Yet in the moment, this seems incomprehensible.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is good. Like, really good. Surprisingly so. The main trio of Lerman, Watson and Miller often find that perfect balance between typical teenage abandon and melancholy, and in particular Lerman and Watson are able to give an otherwise typical “will they/won’t they” romance far more emotional weight than it deserves. (Though credit should also go to Chbosky for keeping that plot unexpected.) In this film, Chbosky has pulled off the tricky feat of making a film about a very specific time and place yet finding ways to make it resonate for people who have long ago left high school as well as those who are just now beginning it. For most, this period only takes up about five percent of their lifespan, but it’s so dynamic an era that people continue to explore it in pop culture to this day. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a heartfelt, uncompromising document of what this time is like for so many people. To the rest of the world, the actions of these few characters are entirely inconsequential. For those involved, few things could be more important.

Grade: A-