Review of Paper Towns (2015) by Manny C — 10 Aug 2015

If you made your way through John Green's The Fault In Our Stars and it's blockbuster adaptation, you likely won't shed much tears from seeing the film taken from Green's novel Paper Towns. But that's a good thing. No one dies from cancer in Paper Towns and the script from Fault In Our Stars scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, they of the ever amazing (500) Days of Summer, shed some of the more weepier bits of Green's book to get at what's funny and touching. Maybe there isn't anything fresh left to mine for in stories about teens coming of age, but director Jake Schrier (Robot and Frank, see it) manages to fake it well.

It helps that he has an amazing cast to sell it. Nat Wolff, who had a role in Fault In Our Stars and was wonderful in last year's Palo Alto, is Quentin Jacobson, or Q for short. Q is incredibly risk-averse, an Orlando nerd who's long had a crush on the wild child next door. She'd be Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevigne), whom Q has known since they were nine and they found a dead body together (a suicide victim). Margo is now the most popular girl in school and one night she randomly climbs through Q's bedroom window, dressed as a ninja, and leads them both on a revenge spree against those who have done her wrong. There's no kill Bills going on, just pranks like shaving off a jock's eyebrows, wrapping a car in plastic and making a video of her cheating boyfriend's tiny dick. But Q's heart is racing. When Margo doesn't show up at school and prom and graduation on the horizon, Q follows her clues, which involve Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, leading him to a small New York town that isn't even on the map (cartographers literally create such fictional towns to protect against copyright infringement, hence the term paper towns).

On his journey, Q brings along his friends, Radar (Justice Smith) and his girlfriend Angela (Jaz Sinclair), as well as horndog Ben (Austin Abrams) and Margo's best friend Lacey (Halston Sage), a sexpot who inspires Ben's carnal yearnings. The road trip is bursting with cliches, and some readers will likely hate the changes, but the central romance is the point here and it never ceases to be compelling. Supermodel turned actress Delevigne does everything but make you bored with yet another Brit actress playing an American teen. Her wild eyes and distinct husk of a voice indicate future starpower, and Wolff is all kinds of amazing, deftly portraying a tender image of romantic yearning and confused adolescence. Paper Towns has a tendency to play it too safe, but it's irresistible nonetheless.