Chbosky: The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

It’s rare that a novelist directs the film version of their own work, and even rarer that it works as well as it does here, as Stephen Chbosky brings his iconic coming-of-age story to the big screen. Set in suburban Pittsburgh in the early 90s, and cut from the same cloth as My So-Called Life, it follows freshman Charlie (Logan Lerman), and his blossoming friendship with two seniors, Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller). As might be expected from a novelist-turned-director, especially one adapting his own work, it’s very wordy, written as much as directed, but that’s probably necessary to capture the hushed, cloistered tone of the novel, as Chbosky translates Charlie’s cryptic, confessional epistolary style into the haunting, charming voiceover that drives the film. As with the novel, too, most of Charlie’s communications to the audience and to himself are about the books he’s read, the films he’s seen and, above all, the music he loves – and while bands such as Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins and the Smiths are quite familiar from the indie dramas of taste formation of recent years, this story charts the discovery of an earlier generation, the generation that emerged just after most of these artists’ heyday. Among other things, that means that there’s a breathless, thrilling sense of discovery that’s perhaps been a bit denuded in the age of the internet – not merely discovering a new artist, but discovering someone else who likes the same artist , a community of like-minded aesthetes. Perhaps that’s why it never really feels absurd that Charlie’s discoveries are so staid – his favourite books are Hamlet, The Catcher In The Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby – since it takes place in a time when taste wasn’t merely a click away, when you couldn’t curate your own radio station, when you might go for days, even weeks, trying to figure out the name and performer of a particular song. And that’s just what happens, as the trio spend most of the film trying to proto-shazam a song that turns out to be David Bowie’s “Heroes,” which they hear in bits and pieces on the radios, CD players and televisions that dot this superb reinvention of science fiction for an age where the immediate techno-past feels more remote than even the most speculative, visionary techno-future.