Very confusing teenage satire: Charlie Bartlett

Charlie Bartlett (15)

Young Anton Yelchin gives a spirited performance as Charlie Bartlett, a bright but goofy teenager from a rich and — yes, you guessed it — dysfunctional family.

His clueless mum (Hope Davis) is permanently on a medicated high, while dad is in clink for tax evasion.

Charlie resents dad’s absence but hasn’t learned that crime doesn’t pay.

Anton Yelchin as Charlie Barlett

His desire for popularity leads him repeatedly astray. Thrown out of private school forforging ID cards, he moves into the public sector and sets himself up as the local high-school drug-dealer and psychotherapist.

In so doing, he clashes with the reluctant school principal (Robert Downey Jr), who when not in an alcoholic stupor and waving a gun, is also the father of Charlie’s girlfriend (Kat Dennings, looking like a schoolgirl Nigella Lawson).

At times, the film seems worryingly keen to suggest that the swiftest way to social success is through peddling drugs.

And as Charlie spouts more and more psychobabble, I found myself wondering why his schoolmates were quite so eager to hail him as their hero.

Director Jon Poll can’t make up his mind whether to be funny or serious.

If he wanted the film to be a teen comedy like Rushmore, he needed to, well, rush more.

If he wanted it to be an angry cryon- behalf-of-misunderstood-youth, like Pump Up The Volume, he needed to sharpen the disciplinary issues.

He seems to be arguing at times that bright adolescents are wiser than their elders, but to get that point across, the teens on display needed to be more subtly drawn andfree-spirited, and the authorities had to be more draconian than the muddled head played by Downey.

If Charlie Bartlett is meant to be a satire on teenagers’ naïve desire to be popular, then we should have been shown the folly of confusing popularity with merit. And if the main theme is a teenage boy’s coming of age, we needed to see a lot more evidence ofspiritual growth.

The film ends with Charlie as annoyingly smug and creepily overconfident as when it started.

I kept wondering if he was the ghastly American love-child of Piers Morgan.

Verdict: Confused teenage comedy about confused teenagers

**