It's not easy growing up, but we all have to do it sooner or later — sometimes much later, as Jonathan Levine's new film, The Wackness, demonstrates. The Wackness stars Josh Peck as a recent high-school graduate who deals dope and learns the facts of life during a summer fling with An Unattainable Girl (Olivia Thirlby). Mentoring him in a not terribly responsible manner is his shrink (Ben Kingsley), who never got over Pink Floyd.

The Wackness, which won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, is a classic coming-of-age film, a genre Hollywood has been exploiting ever since its own adolescence. All the familiar conditions are here: The alienated teenage guy, the sexual and social confusion, and the popular music (in this case, mid-'90s hip-hop) that comments on his situation. Of course, there have been exceptions to these rules. Often more than one guy is groping his way toward adulthood. Occasionally even girls get to grow up, but for the most part it's a man's world, reflecting the industry itself. There is a counter-argument suggesting that women, like men, don't want to see themselves onscreen in anything other than escapist fare.

In the end, what sets these films apart from soap operas and teen sex comedies, and why they are so often low budget or independently financed, is that they are character-driven. And because the issues of identity they address are so particular and at the same time so universal, they sometimes end up summarizing a whole era — and speaking to ours.

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