Adventureland B+

In Theaters, Rated R, 107 minutes

Adventureland distributor Miramax didn’t have faith enough in Greg Mottola’s direction or script to sell this movie for what it is, so they sold it as a sequel to his last film: Superbad. That’s too bad, because the trailers left audiences believing it was a low-watt imitation of a gross-out sex comedy instead of a spot-on coming-of-age story with a healthy does of 1987 nostalgia. Jesse Eisenberg (James Brennan, The Squid and the Whale), is graduating college with a plan to backpack Europe then head to Columbia grad school when his parents hit financial tough times, forcing him to stay home in Pittsburgh and stash money for grad school. Unable to land real employment, a buddy gets him a job at the local amusement park on the Games team (as opposed to the Rides team). It’s the kind of place that I remember from when I was a kid, all midway and bumper cars—basically the state fair without the livestock. He meets up with fellow-slummer Em (Kristen Stewart, Twilight) home from NYU, who’s taken the gig to piss-off her lawyer pops and new step-mom. She’s already ickily involved with the married maintenance man/local rock-n-roller (Ryan Reynolds, who seems way too put together for the role), when she and Jesse hit it off.

Brennan plays Jesse like a not-so-goody Michael Cera, the smartest guy in the room, but not yet quite sure how to spin that to his advantage. He’s clueless about girls, but disarmingly decent—the kind of guy you don’t feel bad rooting for. It’s a shame Twilight will be the film most people that see Kristen Stewart this year will see. While she was okay with an awful script in that one, she hits all the right notes as Em. Not the good girl, but not a bad enough girl to be diddling a married man either, she’s stuck and starting to hate herself. Everyone else is spot-on as well, from Bill Heder and Kristen Wiig (both, SNL) as the married couple that run the park, to Superbad alum Martin Starr as Joel, Jesse’s unlikely best-friend, a nihilistic Russian lit/philosophy major who’s so nerdy, it hurts. Also fun is Wendie Malick (Just Shoot Me) as Jesse’s no-nonsense mom and Margarita Levieva as park hottie Lisa P.

I laughed and laughed, but the real rewards were the memories, from the constantly repeating Rock Me, Amadeus to the dizzying moment of a real connection to the (almost) inevitable heartbreak that follows. It’s exactly how you remember it, which is not the same thing as being exactly how it was, but sometimes better. This one should probably get a B, but I enjoyed it too much and found myself endorsing it too whole-heartedly not to go ahead and bump it up. B+