Rating: 
Director: Jon Poll
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jr., Kat Dennings
Charlie Bartlett is an eager-to-please movie that doesn’t quite know how to fit in, about an eager-to-please kid who doesn’t quite know how to fit in. The film mines territory that has been surveyed by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (which had more laid-back charm) and Rushmore (which was more annoyingly pretentious). Yet it avoids the embarrassing “oh my troubled life of upper-middle-class privilege” that made Garden State suck like self-indulgent indy quicksand.
Charlie’s a rich kid getting kicked out of possibly the last prep school on the east coast as the film starts, a bright and earnest boy saddled with a loving but medicated, drunk and ultimately absentee mother and a father who’s absent in a much more literal sense. With no more rich enclaves to get thrown out of, he’s enrolled in the local public high school, where he shows up in his old school uniform blazer and tie and immediately gets the living crap kicked out of him. Charlie’s problem is popularity, fitting in, and his mother’s—society’s—solution is to medicate the hell out of him. Which is where genius strikes: He ensures his popularity by dispensing a phenomenal range of OTC meds, plus his own brand of earnest, motivational pop-psych, to his fellow students.
The film is rough. First-time screenwriter Gustin Nash could’ve used a little more character development and a little less of Charlie and his mother having family singalongs at the piano. That’s just dead creepy, in a call-her-Jocasta kind of way. What the film has going for it is a really good cast. Anton Yelchin has a lot of charm and comic energy, managing to come off as a youthful and unfinished Jim Carey at times, and at others as a much more believable kid than Matthew Broderick ever was. Yeltsin is surrounded by The Tough Bully and his Synchophantic Sidekick, the Cute Girl, the Total Outcast and a few other stock types in quick cameo. The drawbacks—there’s apparently exactly one bully in this entire school—of these stock players are much eliminated by the quality of the actors playing them. Kat Dennings does not look like she was cast from the usual WB/CW Network pool of plastic models, but she’s charming, pretty and believable. Other supporting characters are equally convincing, and rise above the limitations of the script without fail.
The one ringer in this cast of plausible, unknown kids is Robert Downey Jr. He’s the principal of the school and the divorced father of Charlie’s love interest. Downey plays a guy who wants to be liked, is trapped in a life that seems hard to escape, and turns to the bottle to kill his pain. So, you know, there’s verisimilitude there, too. Like Charlie’s mother, the only other adult really present in the film, he’s more a child than the children, and while that theme is played pretty obviously, it’s not held out as the source of all pain in Charlie’s life.
In fact, the best thing the film does is tell its own idiosyncratic story that covers some of the timeless problems of high school without promising to solve them all, or Explain the Kids to us. Like Yelchin’s Charlie, the film is a sincere, lovable misfit that could stand to grow up a little … but is a lot of fun to hang around with.
