Though it’s set at a low-rent amusement park, Adventureland is essentially a summer camp movie, a nostalgia-tinged look back at the balmy nights and summer flings you may or may not have had in your youth. Nothing in the movie really justifies its setting in 1987, despite some laughs about Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” and trendy fashion, but it does help add a retro-cool sheen to what’s essentially a very standard coming-of-age dramedy. Coming off Superbad, director and writer Greg Mottola is dialing up the sentimentality and realism here, and what he achieves is admirable if a little ho-hum.
Jesse Eisenberg is James Brennan, a sharp-witted, nervously sincere young man who fills up the months before he enters Columbia graduate school by working at a run-down amusement park. The place is called Adventureland, and once James is hired, he hangs out all day long, listening to endless replays of crappy 80’s music as he hands out stuffed animals to lucky prizewinners and gets to know the other kids who are toiling away at this seedy wage-slave carnival. The jobs are horrid, but they’re all in it together, and they become friends.
It’s almost entire James’s story, with a brief dip or two into the story of Em, the sulky girl whom James is immediately smitten with when he begins his thankless job at the games booth. Kristen Stewart, who plays Em, is as always, Kristen Stewart. So, there’s that in regards to her. Living with a stepmom she loathes while on break from NYU, Em has been having a affair with Mike the technician, the kind of king of a small town who lies about having jammed with Lou Reed and ignores his pretty bleached-blonde wife in favor of hanging out with younger kids. Everyone who’s ever grown up in and then left a small town knows someone like that.
The cast of the movie includes a few members of the Apatow stock company (notably Bill Hader as one of the park’s owners and Martin Starr as a nebbishy colleague of James’s with a fondness for Gogol). But in spite of this family resemblance, Mr. Mottola’s film is a relatively sober and cerebral affair, more akin to Dazed and Confused than to Knocked Up or Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
But the movie is funny enough, and an enjoyable ride overall, and most importantly evokes those familiar nostalgic feelings that get you looking over old camp photos one random night. That trace bit of memory takes away a little from the realism that characterizes a bit of Adventureland; even when the movie delves into sadness or some genuinely raw emotions, it mostly gets swept under the banner of “that one crazy summer.” Mottola gets credit for trying, and once again depicting teenagers with a thought or two in their head, even if sex and drugs are, as always, the main agenda.
For the most part the plotlessness of Adventureland is fine, as the movie skates along on its own general good vibes and insight into that particular summertime feeling of having no idea where your life will go next. But after one too many Lou Reed montages, or maybe the second boner joke, the movie can feel a little threadbare, and not nearly as deep, interesting or original as it hopes to be.