‘CHARLIE Bartlett” mixes and matches tropes from “Fer ris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Risky Business,” “My Bodyguard” and several other teen classics to sporadically hilarious effect.
Between this and “Be Kind Rewind,” it must be “I Love the ’80s” week at the movies.
Charlie, played by Anton Yelchin (the cheerful kidnapping victim in “Alpha Dog”) with over-the-top glee, has been tossed out of his umpteenth private school for selling fake IDs.
So, he takes his crested blazer to his first public school, where he is mercilessly hounded as a freak – at least until he finds a new use for the Ritalin he’s been prescribed for his ADD.
The hyper-articulate Charlie takes over a stall in the men’s room and quickly becomes the school’s unofficial shrink, dispensing advice and prescription drugs he scores from a variety of real shrinks.
Unlike the hero of “Risky Business,” Charlie isn’t doing it for the money – he somehow lives in a mansion and has a chauffeur despite his father’s being jailed for tax evasion – but in the hopes of becoming very, very popular.
Debuting director Jon Poll’s masterstroke was in finding a worthy adversary for Charlie.
Robert Downey Jr. – who might have played Charlie back in the ’80s – is ruefully funny as the harried principal, a divorced alcoholic who is horrified to learn that his daughter (the delightful Kat Dennings) is dating Charlie.
As he has done in other films, Downey uses his real-life experience with drugs to inform his performance, which has a very serious undertone below its comedy.
His showdowns with Charlie (one with a gun in his hand) are the movie’s high points, as are appearances by Hope Davis as Charlie’s loopy mom, who exhibits plenty of inappropriate behaviors of her own.
Tyler Hilton is very good as the class bully who becomes Charlie’s personal bodyguard and assistant; among their clients are a suicidal, sexually confused classmate (Mark Rendall) and an insecure cheerleader (Megan Park).
“Charlie Bartlett” starts to get a bit preachy as it works its way toward a climax heavily influenced by “Rushmore,” but it’s still well above average for this type of film.