The Wackness Is Dope Enough
When Ayo! Scott wants to revisit his youth, he watches Kids. Other than the raving and raping, Larry Clark’s 1995 classic about aimless NYC teens skating, boozing, drugging, fucking, fighting, and slurping juice with tampons is like a day in the life of young Ayo!
The Wackness, set in 1994, taps into some of the same nostalgia. High school outsider Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) spends the summer before college selling weed, getting put up on new hip-hop by his connect (Method Man), trading trees for psychiatric therapy, and crushing on his shrink’s stepdaughter (Ayo!’s boo-to-be, Olivia Thirlby). While Kids captured actual city teenagers doing how they once did, The Wackness attempts to transport young actors back in time, which proves tricky. The era references and slang spilling out of their mouths feel forced and untrue at times—though still infinitely more believable than a mesh-tank-top-rockin’ Meth’s embarrassing Jafakin’ accent.
If some details are off, the film still wins by focusing on the angst of first love, making it the coming-of-age story to Clark’s cumming-in-underage-girls story. After all, between skating, boozing, drugging, fucking, fighting, and slurping juice with tampons, we did occasionally fall in love with these hoes. See the trailer and watch scenes after the jump.
