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Adventureland

Directed and written

by Greg Mottola

Starring Jessie Eisenberg,

Kristen Stewart,

and Ryan Reynolds

Classification: 14A

***

Maybe, like James, you've been there too, with one foot fresh out of college and the other deeply mired in some dreary temp job, unable to hide any longer from the hard fact that your diploma comes with an asterisk - that, oops, a degree in Renaissance Studies is really a double major in minimum wage. So, if you're James, you line up beside your new colleagues - the transients, the sheltered-workshop kid, the Russian Lit grad, the high-school dropout who's your immediate superior - and set sail into life's cloudy future.

Thus begins Adventureland, a post-adolescent comedy set back in the mid-eighties, where it deposits our young protagonist smack in the midst of a rundown amusement park. There, relatively speaking, the plum job is operating the "rides," but James (Jesse Eisenberg) is way too unskilled for that exalted post. Instead, he's toiling in "games," the kind where drunken louts compete with snot-nosed tykes to toss red rings over wooden milk bottles in the fond hope of winning "a giant-assed panda." Meanwhile, from a scratchy loudspeaker perched perilously close to his booth, the same infernal disco song repeats again and again like a life-sentence in hell's music room. For James and his tortured ears, it's a long way from dorms filled with the hip melancholy of his beloved Lou Reed.

Yes, the delight of this movie lies in these devilish details, and it's clear that writer-director Greg Mottola knows them well. In his last outing, Mottola teamed with the Judd Apatow crowd to direct Superbad; however, since this is his own script, and loosely autobiographical, he has bigger ambitions here, intent on supplementing the basic comedic farce with a dash of raw sociology and a dollop of real feelings. The menu is admirable, if a bit overcooked on occasion. The laughs are usually fresh, but those feelings are a harder sell. They're the bottled jam of emotions, with artificial colouring and pectin added - digestible, yet too sweetly calculated for my taste.

Best to savour the fun then, enjoying the romp even while dissecting the social archetypes. James is easy: the virginally decent guy, self-conscious even about his self-consciousness, although blessed with a keen mind and a wit quick enough that, scanning the bill of fare in an upscale eatery, he can turn to the garçon and inquire with a disingenuous smile: "I wonder how the fondue is tonight?"

More intriguing, though, are the competing love interests, since neither is what she seems to be. Em (Kristen Stewart) is the clean-cut girl with dirty habits. A product of divorced parents, with a rich lawyer daddy and a pretentious step-mom, she's just slumming at her midway job, and slumming further with Connell the married maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds), the sort of hunky dropout who weds young and then gets old fast. Em is wild by design, James is tame by nature - expect these opposites to attract trouble.

As for Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), she's "the hot blond chick" from the other side of the tracks, an inveterate flirt whose reputation - every guy just knows she's done it with every other guy but him - bears no relation to her reality. In fact, Lisa P is as virginal as James, if not quite as decent and with somewhat different intellectual interests. Back in that upscale restaurant, when the conversation flags, she cuts loose with this sure-fire starter: "Like, would you rather have a speedboat or a sailboat?" Ah, a question for the ages - ponder that, all you wannabe Wittgensteins.

Certainly, Mottola does a nice job playing with the genre's stock coming-of-age figures, inverting some and rounding out others. En route, he coaxes a set of uniformly credible performances from his ensemble cast, and makes effective use of a soundtrack that's as eclectic as the characters - here the Velvet Underground, there Wang Chung. No, the problem with this movie is not the foundation, which is solidly observed and firmly built. Unfortunately, the narrative that gets stuck on top is little more than an ice-cream castle. That's why the emotions turn artificial, precisely because the story grows cutely episodic and the resolution gets transparently pat.

But even here there's an engaging exception, a moment amid the light humour when Em, upset and shouting, delivers a dark gem of truth. What she cries out is the lament of everyone, young or old, freshly graduated or long grizzled, who has ever strained against the unbreakable chains of polite convention, looking in vain for a better way to be honestly good. It's that eternal cry of mute frustration, always loud but impossible to hear: "I can't say what I'm [expletive] thinking."