Charlie Bartlett

The creators of “Charlie Bartlett” seem to have had an elaborate mental checklist of every high school movie cliché known to man and, item by tedious item, set out to check them off.

Hopelessly troubled rich kid expelled from private school and forced to transfer to public? Check. A beating on the first day by a tattooed punk with a mohawk? Check. Love affair with the beautiful (but feisty!) principal’s daughter? Subsequent power struggle with said principal for remainder of the movie? Film resolves in boy overcoming his family issues, getting the girl, and befriending his former enemy, none other than that first-day-of-school bully? Check, check, and check.

The title character Charlie, played by Anton Yelchin (“Alpha Dog”), is an overly earnest, delusionally optimistic troublemaker. Despite a father in jail and a drugged-out mother at home (played by a thoroughly wasted Hope Davis), Charlie approaches life and his new school with a briefcase in hand and a smile plastered on his face. Yelchin clearly has talent but is given little to work with: no amount of acting can give Charlie a sense of depth.

The implausibility of Charlie’s character is matched only by the illogical leaps of the plot. After his psychiatrist prescribes him Ritalin to remedy his “concentration problem,” Charlie is struck by an ingenious idea: create his own psychiatric practice in the stalls of the boys’ bathroom. The way in which he obtains the necessary drugs—memorizing textbook symptoms, then rattling them off to his clueless psychiatrist for a prescription—is as improbable as the advice he dispenses to his insecure classmates. This counseling includes the gem: “Sometimes people say things and mean something else.”

As might be expected, Charlie soon becomes a kind of mythic school hero, much to the chagrin of his principal, Mr. Gardner. Gardner (Robert Downey Jr.) is the lone dynamic character of the film. Downey plays the role so well that his double dislike of Charlie—both for upsetting his school and for pursuing his daughter Susan (Kat Dennings)—is palpable. Yelchin’s Charlie, in comparison, cannot pass muster; he possesses neither the charisma of Ferris Bueller nor the complexity of Holden Caulfield.

Most irritating in the movie’s obvious homage to misunderstood delinquents is its recurring misuse of Cat Stevens’ “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,” guaranteed to enrage any “Harold and Maude” fan. Attempting to draw such a connection comes off as cheap and contrived, a sad reminder of how poorly the movie tries to encapsulate every cinematic teenage rebel of the last half-century.

The film’s many unoriginal lines perhaps best exemplify this. At a party, the football captain, one of the countless students who feels he can trust the all-knowing Charlie, confesses that he has always wanted to go to Paris and study painting. (Wait, are we watching “High School Musical?”) Soon after, Charlie’s bully-turned-BFF Murphey laments his misled life by recalling his role as Linus in a grade-school production of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.” This is almost exactly what Ryan once told Seth on an episode of “The O.C.”

And if the dialogue doesn’t turn you off, the sloppy editing will. After Charlie shacks up with Susan and then runs through a party yelling, “I am no longer a virgin,” the movie cuts to one of Charlie’s “patients” about to overdose on psychiatric drugs. Countless equally abrupt shifts in tone make the film both uneven and uncomfortable.

But the movie ultimately fails not because of poor editing, or lines, or even characters, but because of the cliché elements that permeate all three. It takes what could be an original, stimulating premise and bogs it down with sappy banalities, becoming a mediocre version of every other self-aware teenage movie ever made. In one of the final ostensibly touching—but really just ridiculous—scenes, our protagonist tearfully tells Principal Gardner, “I’m just a kid; I’m just a stupid kid.” For once, Charlie Bartlett, your psychoanalysis rings true.