Patton Oswalt does nuanced, funny work as a bookkeeper in a bar.
You know we’re in the thick of the movie awards season when an Oscar-winning actress like Charlize Theron is playing an alcoholic reliving her adolescence by breaking up her ex-boyfriend’s marriage.
“Young Adult,’’ like director Jason Reitman’s earlier “Juno’’ (also written with a sharp, knowing ear by Diablo Cody), fortunately has the dark (sometimes very dark) wit to wear its ambitions lightly.
It also boasts a killer breakout performance by comic Patton Oswalt as a former classmate who becomes Theron’s unlikely co-dependent and sometimes co-conspirator.
Theron wore pounds of makeup for her Oscar-winning role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster’’ (2003). Mavis, the gorgeous if unhinged character she plays here, is a different variety of monster, the kind who may pose the greatest danger to herself.
Mavis, who subsists on fast food, booze and Diet Coke, is a writer struggling to complete the final episode in a series of teenage novels that’s just been canceled. Recently divorced and living in Minneapolis, she is also stubbornly holding onto her own adolescence a decade and a half after the fact.
An invitation to a naming ceremony for the ex-boyfriend’s new son triggers a synapse in Mavis’ booze- and romance-addled brain. She convinces herself that the ex, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), is feeling “trapped” right now and will welcome her efforts to “rescue” him.
Upon her return to their small home town of Mercury, Minn., the newly dolled-up Mavis deludes herself into thinking that Buddy’s willingness to meet her for a drink and his compliments mean he’s open to her overtures.
Buddy, a simple guy who dotes on his wife (Elizabeth Reaser) and his son, is oblivious to Mavis’ motives almost to the point of stupidity.
But Matt (Oswalt), who works as a bookkeeper in the bar where the rendezvous occurs, instantly sizes up the situation, as well as Mavis’ extreme vulnerability.
It’s Matt’s intervention, and Oswalt’s finely nuanced and sometimes very funny work, that helps make it clear that Theron will not be channeling Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,’’ which seems like a distinct possibility at first.
A toad compared to Buddy’s prince, Matt has been nursing his own crush on Mavis since high school — not that she’s ever much noticed him, even after a gay-bashing incident left him permanently handicapped.
But times change and Mavis, no longer the prom queen, is happy to liberally partake of the open bar that Matt maintains from a still in the garage of the split-level he shares with his sister.
Matt — who incidentally claims not to be gay — is happy to listen for hours to Mavis talk about her fantasies about a new life with Buddy and occasionally even attempts to introduce his new friend to a soupcon of adult reality.
Reitman (he also did the superb “Up in the Air’’) and Cody fill the movie with telling moments, including Mavis’ increasingly frantic attempts to present herself as looking just like the girl that Buddy fell in love with all those years ago.
There is another devastating scene in which Mavis tells her utterly uncomprehending parents she thinks she “may be an alcoholic.’’
It’s also easy to underestimate the contribution of Reaser — an intelligent and underused actress I’ve long liked a lot — as Buddy’s wife. It would be easy to play her as jealous of the returning small-time vamp.
More difficult still is to portray a less-than-gorgeous mother (and occasional bar-band performer) who is so confident of her husband’s devotion that she’s able to look beyond Mavis’ increasingly inappropriate behavior with some measure of sympathy.
Theron’s Mavis, in fact, does some things that made me cringe in “Young Adult.’’ But nobody ever said that adolescence was pretty, even if an increasing number of people are experiencing its final pangs on the cusp of middle age.