Review: ‘The Spectacular Now’

Every few years, a movie comes along that reminds us how we are hearing and seeing the a certain set of stories over and over, yet these particular stories seems to work and continue to reverberate with us each time we see them, and this is because these are usually stories of universal truths, very basic emotions and feelings that just about all of us have gone through and to which we can relate, so that no matter how many times you change the characters and places and even story details, the truth of the emotions still come through. “The Spectacular Now” really doesn’t offer anything new per se, but it’s still a damn good movie and quite possibly one of those films people will be referencing in the future.

In “The Spectacular Now,” Sutter (Miles Teller) is a 17-year old high school senior who is just skating by and seems to be enjoying life to the 100% fullest. The movie starts with him talking about having a hot and fun girlfriend named Cassidy (Brie Larson), but she dumps him over a weird misunderstanding (born out of his reputation for partying hard), which sends him into a drunken downward spiral. Or was he already on that spiral? And then Sutter meets nice girl Aimee (Shailene Woodley), and they develop a friendship that starts to turn into something more, and almost doesn’t, but then it does, and then things are cool, but then there’s not cool, and then they are kinda cool again, and so on and so forth. You know how these high school dramady relationships work. It’s really all about who learns what along the way.

And while Aimee learns a little about how to drink constantly, how to be a girlfriend, and how to stand up for herself against her domineering mother, this story is all about Sutter and how he goes from perpetual yet likable fuck up to something that is at least a little better. But first he has to get over his idea that life isn’t going to get any better than what he has right then and there. He wants to be 17 years old forever, as the self-perceived king of his school and his small town, with no aspirations for the future or college or work or anything other than partying and getting drunk and trying to get laid. It’s easy to see the thematic link between this character and what could be considered an older, more English version of this character in the form of Gary King in “The World’s End,” a bloke who spent twenty years of his adult life trying to act like he’s still 17. It’s not a pretty sight.

There is a nice “peeling back the layers” aspect to the movie’s approach to Sutter’s character, and this is done in the best way possible, as Sutter learns some of these things about himself at the same time we are. There’s a sequence in the movie in which he meets up with his estranged father (Kyle Chandler), and it’s like someone holding up a mirror, showing him his own shitty and self destructive behavior for the first time, and this scares him quite a bit – he becomes scared of what he might become and he’s scared of what he would end up doing emotionally to Aimee, whom at this point is his full on special lady friend. We see Sutter go from the initial joy of reconnecting with his father to the slow realization that his deadbeat dad is indeed a deadbeat dad in just about every way imaginable, which is quite heartbreaking.

This movie still manages to use a lot of humor and fun sequences while still getting into these heavier things, and it’s all a nice mix of comedy and drama, a slick blending of genres to make a John Hughes style movie updated for modern kids and audiences. They actually almost make it seem easy with this movie, which might be the best compliment I can give it, because I know a lot of work went into making this movie seem as smooth, organic and effortless as possible, and it all paid off.