IT’S summer 1987 at a saggy Pittsburgh amusement park called “Adventureland,” which means barf-removal duties, “Rock Me, Amadeus” repeated to the point of induced psychosis and one ironclad rule: No one ever wins a giant-ass panda.
Wearing his “scarlet V” (virginity), a newborn college graduate (Jesse Eisenberg) who majored in uselessness (“Turns out I’m not even qualified for manual labor”) pedals in to work the games booths instead of taking the jaunt to to Europe that his parents promised him. If he can survive this summer, Columbia journalism school beckons, or maybe just teases.
Nearby works a girl (Kristen Stewart) of the same age whose good looks have forced about 10 years’ worth of additional wisdom on her. She’s having an affair with the alpha male of this ecosystem — the married maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds) behind whose toolbox strut lies a rumor that he once jammed with Lou Reed.
A perfectly pitched coming-of-age comedy written and directed by “Superbad” director Greg Mottola, “Adventureland” resembles that movie in the same way that Lou Reed resembles David Lee Roth. They sing completely different songs about much the same things. This time the laughs are soulful, deadpan and dead-on.
Looking through the eyes of James (Eisenberg), what we mainly see are the struggles of Em (a heartbreakingly good Stewart), who has more choices, thus more problems. James, who once broke up with a girl because he was reading a Shakespeare sonnet and decided she didn’t live up to it, crystallizes the movie’s balance of youth and adulthood and the different varieties of naiveté on each side.
The high school-into-college situation behind so many movies is really about getting promoted into the first-class section of childhood. The much more fraught process of figuring out post-college existence inspires fewer but richer films, the best of which is “Kicking and Screaming” by Noah Baumbach, who gave Eisenberg his big break with “The Squid and the Whale.”
“Adventureland” isn’t as clever as “Kicking,” and not nearly as hilarious as “Superbad,” but it’s still a sweet little memory ache, a Proustian cookie co-flavored with semiotics and Whitesnake.
The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.
“SNL’s” Bill Hader plays the bustling, mustachioed supremo who rules the park with the pride of the biggest ant on the hill; Kristen Wiig is his mumbling little missus. Martin Starr is the nerd trying to use Slavic languages to escape his slobby family and Margarita Levieva is the celebrated “Lisa P,” the sexy girl in the one-shoulder T-shirt whose idea of good times is two-fer-Tuesdays at “Razzmatazz” — which depending on your viewpoint is either “a sophisticated meeting place” or the chintziest disco in Pennsylvania. If she really likes you, she’ll move the gum to the back of her mouth before she lets you kiss her.
Mottola, who has based James’ summer of hope and rue on his own amusement-park gig, is fond but not sentimental, keeping enough distance for laughs yet bringing us right inside James’ sneakers for pathos. Avoiding easy gags or repetitive shtick, Mottola lets high-brow dialogue fight to be heard above the crunch of the corn dogs, emphasizing the absurdity of both.
James is a guy who yearns for Husker Du and sonnets; circumstances give him Foreigner cover bands and crotch punches. Adulthood lies across some bridge that seems to be moving farther away, on the other side of a mist of frustration. As a childhood friend drags on him like every childhood memory he’s trying to shake off, James pinpoints the insolubility of everything: “It’s just my life.”
For a throwback to more ’80s, play the ’80s Comedy Films Pop Video Quiz