A hit at this year’s Sundance Festival, The Wackness stars Josh Peck as Luke, a Manhattan kid who lives for hip-hop music and sells marijuana to his classmates. With no friends of his own age, he’s developed a relationship with Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), a middle-aged therapist who trades advice for drugs. Squires, who in the tradition of movie psychiatrists is way crazier than any of his patients, has a younger wife (Famke Janssen) who stays with him out of inertia, and a stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby) who is the unknown apple of Luke’s eye. Filmed largely in the kind of sepia tones that are movie shorthand for nostalgia, The Wackness alternates between letting Kingsley cheerfully overact his part and recreating writer-director Jonathan Levine’s 18th year. The soundtrack is filled with hip-hop songs Levine loved at that age, and in the press notes he goes on about how the genre was at a creative peak that year. That may be true, but it’s equally true that just about everyone thinks that music was never as good as it was when they were 18. If you were 18 and a New Yorker in 1994, The Wackness might strike you as the greatest movie ever made. You might even react that way if you’re around that age now, for its navel-gazing into the difficulties of being 18 and getting pushed out into a world that you’re not ready for. The rest of you, though, may only see a lot of reheated coming-of-age clichés frosted in too many empty stylistic devices.

—m. faust