Pop-Up 80s

Someone remind me—where are we at on the nostalgia chart at the moment? Have we finally managed to move the focus of misty, watercolored memory so near to the present that it’s time to go unstuck through the decades? (Any time, as ever, is always better than now.)

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in Adventureland.

So be it. Adventureland takes us back to the summer of 1987, when the thin promises of the Reagan revolution had all soured, and punk and new wave had given way to formula pop music.

It was a year notable for just about nothing. And yet people lived anyway, doing the things that they always do: working, falling in love, finding unhappiness in both of those but every once in awhile finding enough happiness to make them keep trying.

Written and directed by Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers) from memories of his own experiences, Adventureland is named for a somewhat rundown amusement park in Pittsburgh. This is where our hero, James (Jesse Eisenberg), is forced to take a summer job. He has just graduated from college with a degree in Renaissance studies. The inevitable indifference of human resources officers everywhere matters not to him because he’s going to grad school—Columbia, no less—where he can continue to live in a nice, cozy, intellectual cocoon. But a summer meant to be spent backpacking in Europe gives way to one overseeing games that are rigged so that no one can win the good prizes (“criminal misuse of the laws of perspective,” as a fellow employee puts it) when his father is demoted and the family has to tighten their belts.

Here’s the thing I like most about Adventureland: 50 years from now, assuming people are still looking at movies to explain the past, the universal image of youth in the 1980s will not be formed solely by John Hughes movies. And, while noting the crappy pop music of the time (what a hellish year it must have been to work in a theme park!), it also pulls together all of the good music of the time as well. (Remember how many people discovered Lou Reed for the first time in the mid 1980s?)

You may remember Eisenberg as the callowly pretentious son in The Squid and the Whale, a role that suited his angular, curly-haired geekiness to a T. He could be that same character here, with some but not all of the rough edges whittled off: At least when he tells a story about how he passed on his closest shot to date at losing his virginity because the girl didn’t make him feel that way that Shakspeare’s Dark Lady did the bard (i.e., like writing sonnets of swooning passion), it’s meant to be self-mocking.

Because it is what happens in movies like this, James falls in love with a fellow worker, the down-to-earth yet subtly distant Em (Kristen Stewart). They get along so well that he pays her the ultimate geek compliment of making her a mix tape of his favorite bummer songs (“real pit of despair stuff, you’ll love it!”, he promises). Only later does he learn that the mixed signals he gets from her are due to—well, let’s just say that that the movie has an element of The Apartment in a theme park.

Adventureland has a distant place in the Judd Apatow diaspora: Mottola also directed Superbad, and the cast includes Apatow regulars Bill Hader and Martin Starr. But it lacks Superbad’s uncomfortable raunchiness, and is more consistent than the average Apatow comedy, lacking both the highs and lows.

The supporting cast includes a surprisingly good Ryan Reynolds as the struggling musician who supports himself as the park’s fix-it guy (who knew he could actually act?) and Hader and Kristen Wiig as the couple who own and run the park. (If Hader and Wiig could be as good on Saturday Night Live as they are in dozens of movies, I’d go back to watching that show.)

Watch the trailer for Adventureland