Review: The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

Release date: 3 October 2012
Certificate: 12A
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Starring: Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller

What's the story?
A shy high-school student (Lerman) with a troubled past finds it less difficult to fit in after he is befriended by a gay oddball (Miller) and his wild-child stepsister (Watson).

What did we think?
There's nothing new in this rite of passage tale about a sensitive youth with a dark sob story. Yet the winning performances from its stars and the film's well-observed 1990s details make it easy to get invested in the characters as they stumble their way through the minefield of adolescence.

Percy Jackson, Hermione Granger and the Kevin We Need to Talk About comprise an unlikely trio in Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own cult novel. Anyone who was ever tortured by the odd growing pain, though, is sure to see something they recognise in this tale of a young recluse who finds the courage he needs to emerge blinking from his shell.

Set in Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, Perks derives much of its low-key charm from its depiction of a simpler, pre-internet age, one in which characters express their feelings through painstakingly assembled mix-tapes and a fancy-dress screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the last word in transgressive entertainment. Even a landscape as unthreatening as this one, however, is still one full of peril for Charlie (Lerman), an introverted freshman with secret rage issues stemming from a family trauma buried in his subconscious.

It takes one flamboyant misfit (Ezra Miller, excellent) and a seemingly unobtainable object of desire (Emma Watson sporting a credible US accent in her first 'grown-up' role) to turn things around for this diffident wallflower. And it's surely a measure of the film's success that you leave wishing you'd had friends just like them.

Verdict: Blooming marvellous.