YOUNG ADULT came out in 2011, a very strong year with at least two dozen good films, most of them not receiving their due from audiences. Case in point, this pocket-sized entry that only reached 126th place at the box office. Acutely perceptive, acerbically funny, paper cut painful, another notch in the plus column for whip-smart writer Diablo Cody, her frequent collaborating director Jason Reitman, and their front & center star, Charlize Theron. Like most actors, she’s been in projects that range in quality, but whether they hit or miss, she’s never less than good in them, frequently stellar: this edgy look at self-deceptive immaturity offers her and us one of her top-tier roles.

At 37, Minneapolis-based ‘Mavis Gary’ (Theron, 36) has done well as a ghostwriter for a series of novels keyed to the ‘young adult’ market. Strikingly beautiful, studiously chic, arrogantly confident in her seductivity, she’s also divorced, isolate, bitter and alcoholic. An e-mail about her high-school ex and his wife expecting a child piques her enough that she road-trips to her ‘hick’ hometown of ‘Mercury’ to look up ‘Buddy Slade’ (Patrick Wilson), imagining she can resurrect their romance, not giving a flying fig whether anyone else is hurt as a result. An encounter with another less-lucky classmate, ‘Matt Freehauf’ (Patton Oswalt), starts her myopic quest off in a direction that leads not where she wanted it to go but where it needs to. Once a school ‘geek’ who was permanently disabled after a beating from jocks who presumed he was gay, schlubby ‘nobody’ Matt has character, a vital trait that’s eluded amber-stuck Mavis.

Saluting a different kind of Patton hero (incidentally named after George S. himself)

Cody’s complex individuals are beautifully etched; trope’y quirks are absent in favor of minute captures of truth, the ebb & flow of absurdity and revelation expressed in bodily postures, facial expressions and vocal tells that are subtle, obvious or a mix of both. As some nameless sage sighed “It takes all types”. Complicating that is that often several types joust for captain in the same vessel. In everyday’s 24 & repeat cycle, dealing with that/them can be emotionally exhausting. Watching instinct-honed performers act it out for us in three acts of reel life, however, can be safely fascinating. It can even help. The cost of an average therapy session in the Land of the Fee typically runs $200. Balance that come-back-weakly-for-the-next-ten-years-Mercedes-purchaser against a few bucks for a good movie that you can replay. On your own couch, while you eat.

Cine-therapy this time is aided by the much worthy Patton Oswalt, in one of his occasional dramatic/seriocomic roles (Big Fan, Please Stand By), who takes on the wry-me? brunt-bearer job for the rest of Mavis-battered Mercury. The fairly-well-adjusted citizens have only their decency as insurance against the tornadic “psychotic prom-queen bitch” who inhabits a self-kidding masquerade as a woman of the world/walking Bond girl but is really just a Stepfordian version of the teenage chicks she ghosts vapid drivel about. Theron’s fierce enough to be fearless about playing a gorgeous yet deeply unattractive character, doing it with such gene-deep precision and conviction that you’re fascinated, much like observing a cobra behind unbreakable glass. Her venom-spitting yet self-poisoning small town slut-gone-sophisticate joins claws with her other, actually lethal ladies unfair of Monster, Snow White And The Huntsman, Prometheus, and Atomic Blonde. 

                        Beware all ye who…etcetera

Though set in Minnesota it was shot—in a lightning 30 days—in eight small New York towns. Carried out for $12,000,000, bringing back $23,939,000, 29% of that abroad.  94 minutes, with Collette Wolfe (endearingly guileless as Matt’s sister ‘Sandra’), Elizabeth Reaser (Buddy’s wife ‘Beth’), Jill Eikenberry, Mary Beth Hurt and Louisa Krause.

* Overlooked by young adults in 2011—The Eagle, The Thing, The Tree Of Life, The Rum Diary, Win Win, Salmon Fishing In Yemen, Cedar Rapids, A Dangerous Method, The Guard, The Raid: Redemption, Martha Marcy May Marlene, A Better Life, Take Shelter, Red State, Attack The Block, The Flowers Of War, God Bless America, The Mill And The Cross.

Cody: “This common question I would get at Q&As or press junkets or what-have-you was: “Why are you so fixated on [movies about] adolescents?” [I began wondering:] Am I stunted somehow? And so as I thought about my own life, I thought, “Gosh, that would be a great character—a woman in her 30s who writes young-adult fiction and does in fact cling to deluded teenage fantasies in her real life, and is obsessed with recreating her teenage years come hell or high water.”

Theron: “Patton and I right off the bat had such great chemistry. From the moment that we met. We have the same sense of humor. He didn’t let me get away with my shit. I didn’t let him get away with his shit. In a way we became the characters. It sounds so bizarre but we just started having that relationship where he pushed my buttons and I pushed back. Between him and Jason I’ve never laughed so much in my entire life. He’s so fast and witty. With him I didn’t feel bad. The day players I hugged them more. It was more like the lady who played the salesperson or the manicurist. It’s bizarre to walk in and be a day player and then someone is incredibly rude to you on top of that. I felt more guilty with those people. I did a lot of apologizing!”

No need to apologize to us, Charlize: we’d watch you read a tax form.