The Wackness (15)

The writer-director Jonathan Levine has reeled back to his high-school graduation year in The Wackness.

This bittersweet odd-couple comedy bids a fond adieu to the hip-hop summer of 1994, when Mayor Giuliani was bent on cleaning up Manhattan and would-be hipsters still said "word" to mean "I agree".

Teenager Luke (Josh Peck) counters depression and his parents' screaming rows by roaming the streets selling dope out of an ice-cream pushcart. He finds an unlikely ally in his shrink, Dr Squires (Ben Kingsley), a drug addict with a drifting wife (Famke Janssen) and time on his hands to give Luke a few pointers about getting laid – his personal antidote to the doldrums. Then Luke falls for the doc's step-daughter Stephanie, and things really start falling apart.

Kingsley, so recently the priapic control freak of Elegy, here proves he can do laidback and lowdown as an ageing hippie so entirely friendless that he resorts to a teenage dopehead for company. In what might be the most bizarre pairing of the year, Sir Ben also gets to neck with Mary-Kate Olsen in a dive-bar phone booth: a collector's item, methinks. He's very good, in any case, as are the sleepy-eyed Peck (the fat bully in Mean Creek), and Olivia Thirlby as the sweetheart who's seemingly wise beyond her years. She it is who sets Luke straight, urging him to focus on the good in life, not just the bad – or, as they put it back then, the dopeness, not the wackness. The film's forlorn charm is a little reminiscent of Cameron Crowe's adolescent memoir Almost Famous. It's a tiny bit soppy, too, but you can forgive that in a teenager.

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