At heart it’s a fish out of water comedy with a nod to the such high concept ‘80s flicks as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or anything featuring Michael J. Fox. Our eponymous hero is a rich, gifted kid who, after one prank too many, is expelled from his snooty private academy and condemned to public school.
An enterprising fellow, Charlie soon uses his team of psychiatrists to secure a crash of psychotropic prescriptions which he administers from his makeshift therapist’s office in the gentleman’s facilities. The usual rules for the high school popularity contest apply, and supplying free meds catapults him right into the male equivalent of the Heathers league.
Back home, in a seriocomic development, he shoulders the twin responsibilities of an absent father and a daffy mother. The fact that she’s played by Hope Davis only adds to the impression that we’re now watching a dysfunctional indie standard.
But wait. It’s Robert Downey Jr. playing the Crusty Old Dean. (Yes. You did read that correctly.) He’s even got a hot teenage daughter with a thing for our preppie hero. So we’re in Animal House territory, right? Wrong. RDJ, it transpires, is secretly a mean alcoholic with a passion for drunken gun waving.
At the centre of all these wayward plot developments we find Young Mr. Yelchin in the title role. His muted performance fits a curiously blank character. Charlie Bartlett is, we feel, too wealthy and surefooted to ever suffer any real consequences for his well-intentioned brand of mischief. It’s left to occasional outbreaks of wide-eyed teen angst to compensate for this breach of the laws of dramatic tension.
Happily, adolescent earnestness and Mr. Downey Jr. at the top of his game are more than enough to save the movie from it’s sprawl of ambitions.