Review: 'Adventureland'

The thing to know about "Adventureland" is not just that it has goals above its station but that it actually achieves them. With the help of a talented cast led by Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart and a potent soundtrack, writer-director Greg Mottola has taken that most overdone of contemporary genres, the coming-of-age story, and made it engaging, bittersweet and even fun.

It's been more than a decade since Mottola made his independent film debut with the underappreciated "The Daytrippers," and though he's had success as a toiler-for-hire in the Judd Apatow vineyards, directing both series television and "Superbad," it's good to see him back with a noticeably well-written film that has a genuine charm to it.

That doesn't mean that "Adventureland" reinvents the wheel. The outlines of the film's first-love plot are nothing if not familiar, and trace elements of best-forgotten genre conventions like gross-out scenarios and parents who are either losers or hopeless fools still remain.

What we get instead of something completely new is a demonstration of what the genre looks like when the wheel is custom-made. Character and dialogue are more important to the film's success than its plot, and though we can see where the story is headed well before the people who are living it, "Adventureland's" recognizable satisfactions feel well earned.

Mottola has set "Adventureland" in 1987, at a time when the writer-director was himself working in a venue similar to Kennywood, the park in Pittsburgh where the film was shot. It also adds to the substance of the story that its protagonists are old enough to either be in college or actually out of it, even though by taking a job at Adventureland they are, in the words of one employee, "doing the work of pathetic lazy morons."

This is definitely not the way James Brennan (Eisenberg) expected to be spending the summer between college graduation and a fall semester at New York's Columbia Journalism School. An awkward, brainy guy who reads poetry for pleasure and has idealistically remained a virgin because he doesn't want to divorce sex from love, James thought he'd be in Europe, the home of "sexually permissive cultures," but his father's financial reverses mandate a summer job.

Making things worse, James' employment experience, highlighted by his work for the Gordian Knot, the college literary magazine, is so feeble he's "not qualified for manual labor." So off he goes to Adventureland, where the games of chance are rigged, the rides make you throw up and anyone who can walk or chew gum can get a job.