(2009) Living in Oakland, California, with his 48-year-old, desperate-for-male-companionship mother Estelle (Jean Smart) and her bearded bum of a boyfriend Jerry (Zach Galifianakis), 16-year-old gangly, gawky, pallid, bird-like in his fledgling-adult form, Nick Twisp (Michael Cera), an articulate aspiring novelist and avid reader who enjoys listening to Frank Sinatra records and watching foreign films but whom girls find sort of freakish, narrates his adolescent adventures toward losing his virginity in director Miguel Arteta's very funny, wacky romantic comedy adapted from C.D. Payne's novel series (screenplay by Gustin Nash).

Estelle depends on child support from Nick's father George (Steve Buscemi), who lives with his much younger girlfriend Lacey (Ari Graynor). Nick shares his obsession of wanting female companionship with his pal Lefty (Erik Knudsen), who shares his fantasies of devouring his crush Millie.

When three ill-disposed sailors come looking for Jerry because of a crappy car he'd sold them, he hightails it north with Estelle and Nick to a crappy trailer at Clear Lake where Nick encounters a "comely angel," the precocious and pert Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), who shares some of his intellectual enthusiasms and everything French, residing in a luxurious mobile home with her fanatically religious parents (M. Emmet Walsh and Mary Kay Place).

After instructing Nick at the lakeside to apply sun lotion to her "exposed areas," Sheeni confesses, "I should tell you I have a boyfriend," taller and preppy Trent Preston; in reply Nick, after defining his rival as being "a handsome pretentious poet," invents his own French girlfriend Martha Singwal, a professional model specializing in lingerie: "She tells me that she likes my hair." Nonetheless, while resting from freeform hiking she reads from his journal (upsetting him) and then says: "Kiss me, you weenie."

Abruptly having to return to Oakland with his mom because of Jerry's bad back, Nick takes along their "love-child" dog Albert but determines to get kicked out of his mother's house by becoming "very, very bad," rather than continuing to be excessively polite and nice, with the cunning help of his "supplementary persona," "contemptuous of authority," Francois Dillinger (Cera with moustache, cigarettes, and dark glasses): "You're not going to get this girl by sitting around listening to records and jerking off."

However, when Jerry suddenly dies of a heart attack, Estelle suffers further at news that the corpse and Jerry's white convertible Lincoln Continental are to be returned to his wife; but to console her Officer Lance Westcott (Ray Liotta) moves in. Nick's alter ego asks the cop: "I thought there were laws in the city against illicit cohabitation, or are they just another big policeman's joke?" Taking charge of Nick's ambition to get back to Sheeni, Dillinger drives the caddy with a trailer on which "God's Perfect Asshole" has been painted into Berkeley, igniting a conflagration.

Sent to live with his father - who has found work in Ukiah through Sheeni's efforts - Nick soon discovers that his bad reputation has convinced her parents to send Sheeni south to L'Ecole des Arts, a boarding school, in Santa Cruz; Nick and his new friend Vijay Joshi (Adhir Kalyan) from school (who knew Sheeni, receives letters from her, and wants to make acquaintance with her sexually adventurous roommate Taggarty) drive down for a visit. Surreptitiously spending the night in the girls' room, just as Dillinger is about to seduce Sheeni - "I want to tickle your belly button ... from the inside" - the boys are found out.

When the incident fails to get Sheeni expelled, Nick/Francois enlists the cooperation of Trent's new inamorata Bernice Lynch (Jade Fusco) in another scheme. Invited over to the Saunders' home by Sheeni's older brother and pothead Paul (Justin Long) for Thanksgiving dinner, Nick finds her parents 'shroomed-out on Paul's appetizers of stuffed Psilocybin mushrooms, which Nick also samples and Francois greedily gobbles.

There's good news (Sheeni's home) and bad news (the cops are on their way to arrest Nick, and Preston shows up to inform Sheeni that Nick was instrumental in her getting expelled). Dillinger warns Nick: "If you end up going to jail a virgin, I won't be sticking around."

Fred Willard has the role of a helpful neighbor, a radically liberal activist: "a good man but really strange." Ironically with the movie's having an R rating (for language, an animated sequence of the sex act, and smoking) from the Motion Picture Association of America, none of the principal characters (all under 17 years of age) should view this picture without being accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. You know what Francois, puffing on his fag, would say to that.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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