Slashing The Seats

The Freezepop T-Shirt in the back of my wardrobe is proof that we’ve all done stupid things to impress girls, but Nick Twisp takes it a bit further than most in Dimension Film’s new adap of C.D.Payne’s enormous teen saga, and just about gets away with it too.

Living in a trailer with Zakk Galifianakis isn’t my idea of fun either, so when Michael Cera’s secretly-cool dorky Twisp bumps into Sheeni Saunders, he seizes on her Francophilia with a vengeance, creating an entirely new hipster persona – the preposterously monikered Francois Dillinger – and sets about an escalating campaign of crime –all in the name of love naturally.

Payne’s original book is absurdist in the extreme, but transfers well to the screen thanks to it’s penchant for blackly-humorous, if ridiculous, skits that nailed their colours to that staple of teen drama: Girls love a bad boy.

Cera himself is a great piece of casting. Over the past year his career went into mini-freefall with the likes of Year One blotting his otherwise impeccable CV, but it helped foster a nice guy loser persona that he delights in ripping to shreds here, his performance subtle and tinged with spite. He excels in scenes where his two personalities play off against each other, Francois pencil-tache lips sneering with just the right amount of Gallic stereotype, while the surrealist touches that director Arteta excels at make it impossible not to laugh, even when watching the ravings of a split-personality nutjob. You’ll find yourself drawn to Dillinger, his Tyler Durden-lite blackmail and arson curiously loveable and compelling as he fights his very odd fight to get the girl.

Overall the movie relies a little too heavily on set-pieces, coming off as a surrealist sketch show at times, but with able performances from the leads and strong support from the likes of Steve Buscemi (as Cera’s teen-chasing dad) it ends up being a comic teen Fight Club that hopefully marks an end to Cera’s downward slump.

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