Charlie Bartlett (15)

This is a movie about high school kids that’s has the virtue of originality and student characters, who look young enough for their roles as opposed to the  22 year old fashion model types usually seen in such films. The high school too has more of a sense of grungy reality, being more like a London “sink” comprehensive with the pupils totally out of control and reluctant to study and a headmaster who's been driven to drink by the job.  

Yelchin, a movie veteran at 18, plays the title role of the wealthy teenager, who's been kicked out of every private school for his creatively illegal enterpreneurial activities. The only option left for him is ordinary high school. At first Charlie with his smart clothes and diffidently polite manner sticks out like a sore thumb and is bullied. But when his fey and flaky mother (Davis) sends him off to a psychiatrist, who immediately puts him on prescription drugs, Charlie happens on the best wheeze yet for winning friends and influencing people. Moving from shrink to shrink, feigning symptoms and collecting more and more prescriptions, he sets himself up as the school agony aunt, dispensing common sense advice from his surgery in the boys' toilets and doling out the dope for a small financial consideration.  

Charlie is the sort of original and well written character for a young actor that Juno was for Ellen Page.   Blandly good looking, mature beyond his years in his relationship with him mother, where his is more the carer to her and nursing fantasies of being the most popular boy in the school Yelchin plays the role to hilt and is totally engaging, despite being a bit of a smarty pants. The other teen characters are interesting too.   Kat Dennings sporting bright red lipstick plays the Principal’s lively and rather Goth style daughter, with whom Charlie forms a romantic alliance much to her father's chagrin and Tyler Hilton is the initially loathsome fellow student Murphy who  bullies the geeky newcomer on his arrival but then becomes Charlie’s right hand man in his innovative approach to drug trafficking. Downey as the hapless Principal with a drink and discipline problem turns a character who could have been rather ugly and unpleasant into someone, who’s sympathetic and funny in his blunders and muddle.

The film's very neatly directed with an interesting sense of style and it moves along at a brisk lick.   It would appear that neither the writer (Gustin Nash) nor the director have a lot of time for psychiatrists, who are nicely sent up here. There is also an amusingly subversive criticism in the film of society's hypocritical endorsement of freely prescribed and commercially produced "good" medication while condemning other drugs as "bad" - even though both are addictive and potentially harmful. This is a first feature for both Nash and Poll.   I look forward to seeing more of their work.