The Spectacular Now has a fantastic trailer, which emphasizes the charisma of the two leads, and sells it as a teenage falling in love story, successfully hiding the film’s true core story line: a dreary and unrewarding tale about the destructiveness of alcoholism – basically the boy is an alcoholic who walks around drinking from a flask of whisky all day long, and his relationship with the girl is to turn her into an alcoholic too.

Once you fall for the trailer and go to see the movie, you immediately realize the dialog is far too weak and sparse to support any kind of significant character development, or a relationship story with any depth. They had the kids cast really well, but all they gave them to say is the superficial, disjointed and incoherent stammering of real-life everyday speech – this may produce some authentic-feeling moments of high school adolescence in the early parts of the film, but the charm of this quickly fades, and as with so many modern indie films this crumbling dialogic foundation spells doom to any narrative hopes beyond reality TV. At the very end of the movie, the filmmakers do make a strange, half-hearted attempt to create the illusion (there’s no other way to put it) that something actually happened in this film, but all it does is re-emphasize the fact that nothing did.

From its trailer, I though this film might wind up being this year’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Instead, it turns out to be just another unambitious piece of indie trash. I highly recommend avoiding it.