The Wackness (15)

Well, it's happening already. Just when I'd got used to the idea of films looking back fondly at the Eighties, here comes The Wackness, which views 1994 as ancient, floppy-haired history. The main difference between now and then, it seems, is that Rudy Giuliani's zero-tolerance policies had yet to smooth off New York's rough edges, so the film's 18-year-old hero, Josh Peck, can sell marijuana from an ice-cream cart he pushes around Central Park. But his thriving business doesn't cheer him up.

With three months of muggy Manhattan summertime to kill before he goes to college, Peck has no friends to talk to, and no family except for his bickering parents. His only company is a therapist, Ben Kingsley, whom he pays with bags of pot. During their unconventional counselling sessions, Kingsley advises his lonely patient to have meaningless sex with the first girl he can, without realising that Peck has his eye on Kingsley's own stepdaughter, Olivia Thirlby.

For a while, The Wackness seems to be slouching along as aimlessly as its hero, but it develops stealthily into a clever comedy, and from there it develops further into an honest, compassionate coming-of-age story. Jonathan Levine, the writer-director, gives Kingsley his spiciest role since Sexy Beast, as a frazzled ex-hippie with a mile-wide self-destructive streak, and Kingsley sinks his teeth into it. Peck is almost as impressive. A world away from the hyper-articulate, hyper-confident hipsters of Juno and Superbad, his insecure romantic is the most recognisable and lovable teenager we've seen in a film for years.

The Wackness doesn't go overboard with its Nineties fashion, I'm relieved to say, but it is the kind of personal, tender-hearted indie comedy that was a lot more common in the 1990s than it is now.