CHARLIE BARTLETT

Anton Yelchin (Charlie Bartlett) and Robert Downey Jr. (Principal Gardner).

Everyone can remember the want to be popular and accepted in high school. As Charlie Bartlett, played by Anton Yelchin, puts it, when you’re 17 years old that’s pretty much all that matters. After being kicked out of his last private school for making fake IDs, Bartlett’s mother, played by Hope Davis, places him in public school.

The opportunity to make friends presents itself after Bartlett visits his family’s on-call psychiatrist and is prescribed Ritalin. Bartlett partners with the school’s bully/drug dealer and is soon treating the entire student body from the cheerleaders to the geeks by way of therapy sessions in the boy’s bathroom.

The film Charlie Bartlett gives a face to teenage angst and with a dynamite-supporting cast, including Robert Downey Jr., Hope Davis and Kat Dennings, it successfully tackles serious subjects as suicide, divorce and breaking the law.

From a duet between Yelchin and Davis of Those were the Days from the 1970s television show All in the Family, to Yelchin walking down the hall to Curtis Mayfield’s Pusherman, the film is filled with comic relief all the while sending the message home that everyone has problems and if they become too much to handle—“Would you like to talk about it?”

2 1/2 shells up (based on a 4 shell scale)

—Shelley Green


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