Writer-director Jonathan Levine takes viewers on a hip-hop, ganja-fueled nostalgia trip in "The Wackness," a coming-of-age love story starring Josh Peck.

It's the summer of 1994 in Manhattan, and recent high school graduate and weed man Luke Shapiro is approaching the season with anxiety. His constantly fighting parents are teetering on the brink of financial ruin; Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the girl he's crushing on, barely knows he exists; and his only confidant is drug-addled psychiatrist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), who happens to be Stephanie's stepfather -- and Luke's best client.

Levine does a good job setting up the atmosphere in New York at the dawn of Giuliani Time, thanks especially to a soundtrack dominated by such hip-hop godfathers as Nas and Notorious B.I.G. He doesn't do quite as effective a job with his characters, who never quite manage to earn our sympathies. Kingsley might as well be channeling Harvey Keitel at his most Noo Yawk as a grizzled (and kind of pathetic) arrested adolescent. Peck, taking a page from the Mary Louise Parker school of acting, seems incapable of closing his mouth as the slack-jawed, maddeningly inert Luke.

The dopest thing about "The Wackness" is Thirlby, who, after supporting turns in "Juno" and "Snow Angels," is quickly becoming reason enough to see any film she's in. And yes, that's Mary-Kate Olsen as the pixilated hippie girl Squires makes out with in a nightclub phone booth.

-- Ann Hornaday (July 11, 2008)

Contains pervasive drug use, profanity and some sexuality.