14 Love Stories: THE SPECTACULAR NOW

Happy February!  We're halfway through the late winter doldrums, and that means its time for candy hearts and movies about young beautiful people trying to score.  Don't give me any of that anti-Valentine's Day crap.  I'm single and even a bit cynical, but I think that just makes it better.  The nice thing about Valentine's is that, being about romantic love, there's a whole genre of films appropriate for holiday viewing; the trick is finding the good ones!  I'll give you a few of my recommendations, 14 to be exact.  I don't know if these are really the "best" romance movies ever, and I few of them I'm sure are not, but I personally love each one.

The coming-of-age teen romance is a standard Hollywood formula; set in high school, almost always in the senior year of our main characters, a young man (typically from the wrong side of the tracks) and a young woman (typically a shy, good girl with iffy confidence) have a meet-cute, usually the first real interaction despite being in the same class for years.  People don't think they belong together (more often than not, it's the girl's dad who must be won over), but they change each other for the better, and probably split up after graduation.  If we get really lucky, on of them will die.  However, every once in a while, a movie comes along that manages to take that formula and play by the rules, while somehow returning it to its long-absent purity, resulting in a rare familiarity matched against an aching immediacy.
THE SPECTACULAR NOW  (2013)
Directed by James Ponsoldt
Starring: Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Masam Holden, Dayo Okeniyi, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Rated R for alcohol use, language and some sexuality -all involving teens.
 Availability:  New Release, available at Redbox, video streaming services and most retailers

Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) is a high school senior who lives in the spectacular now, without regard for future or consequence.  At the tender age of 18, he's already a bona fide alcoholic and lives a life of hedonistic partying with his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larson).  Sutter's grades are poor and he has no future plans, but what does that matter if your life is practically over by the time you reach adulthood?  That's how Sutter sees things, but Cassidy is fed up with him and the negative effect he's having on her life, so she breaks up with him.  He deals with this setback the way he deals with all setbacks: he drinks himself into oblivion.  When he wakes up after a night of extreme drinking, Sutter finds himself on a stranger's lawn, with his high school peer/social outsider/paper delivery person Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley) standing over him.  She helps him up, and he decides to help her out on her paper route and on a whim, he takes her out to lunch.  Despite having never paying her much notice before, Sutter becomes interested with Aimee, and takes up her interests in science fiction literature and magna comics.  She tutors him with his geometry homework, and he introduces her to alcohol.  Together, Sutter and Aimee bring each other up and down while bonding along the bumpy road to graduation and self-realization.
The core concept of bad boy meets nice girl is a distinctly cliched one, but THE SPECTACULAR NOW plays against that cliche, creating that elusive product that is both familiar and thoroughly refreshing.  There are a lot of bad romance movies, bad teen movies and bad teen romance movies, and most, if not all of them want to honest about those experiences and feelings, so it's something very special when it actually works out.  Among those great 'teenage experience'/coming of age films are THE BREAKFAST CLUB, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT and SUPERBAD (yes).  THE SPECTACULAR NOW also ranks alongside those films.
These films have emotional ups and downs, but they're insightful, life-affirming and relatable.  THE SPECTACULAR NOW deals with teenage feelings frankly and on a level that meets the viewer head on.  Aimee and Sutter are not "movie teenagers" full of self-pitying lamentations or angsty snark.  The actors don't even wear make up onscreen, so you can see their blemishes and pores like you certainly won't when Woodley stars in DIVERGENT in March.
Even beyond the real-world teenage aspect, the nature of the focal romance is inspired.  Typically, when the popular bad boy and the good wallflower girl fall for each other in movies, it's their respective peer groups pulling from them at the sides to break them apart (see: GREASE, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, PRETTY IN PINK), but for Aimee and Sutter, it is their own relationship that threatens to throw them in opposing directions like identical magnetic poles forced together.  Sutter's alcoholism makes it nearly impossible for him to commit to anything else, and Aimee's newly-acquired taste for booze threatens her own future.  Sutter's lifestyle is fun, and his charming "live now" philosophy is what brought them together, but as time progresses, it also becomes their greatest threat.
THE SPECTACULAR NOW doesn't deal in easy lessons, but neither does life, and in the comfort of cinema, it's the sort of film that inspires the real-life fortitude to take on our real-life challenges.