Review by Heather Christie

Directed by Miguel Arteta

The lengths that some will go for love? Bounded by the limits of mere mortals. The lengths that a teenage boy will go to get it on for the first time? Changes mere mortals into gods.

Based on the novel by C.D. Payne, Youth in Revolt tells the tale of Nicholas Twisp (Michael Cera), who suffers from a chronic case of teenage virginity of which he’s all too aware. Precociously cultivated, literary minded and possessed of impeccable grammar, Twisp naturally doesn’t stand a chance of getting laid because, as we all know, the pricks usually get the girls.

After a series of unfortunate events involving the navy and a banana, Twisp, his mom, and her boytoy must skip town to a trailer park. There Twisp meets the beautiful Francophile Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) and his life changes forever.

Before long, and by a virtue of a series of convoluted events, Twisp invents a French doppelganger who helps him to commit a series of heroic and/or idiotic feats of derring-do in order to win the love of Sheeni in the hopes that she will ditch her all-too-perfect boyfriend Trent—who is fluent in French, windsurfs, and writes percussive futurist poetry, among other things (read: douchebag).