Behaving Badly (2014)

Behaving Badly arrives in 2014 with the confidence of a film that has no interest whatsoever in being seen. Nat Wolff plays Rick Stevens, a teenager who wagers a mobster's son that he can bed Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez) before Arbor Day, and the ensuing ninety minutes involve a best friend's mother, a drug-addled employer, and the local constabulary. It is a teen sex comedy of the old school, which is to say it treats the bet as a plot engine and never pauses to consider whether the arrangement might warrant a lecture. It does not. There is no lecture. There is Gary Busey.

The supporting cast is a curiosity cabinet of recognizable faces: Mary-Louise Parker, Elisabeth Shue, Heather Graham, Jason Lee, Cary Elwes, Patrick Warburton, and a cameo from Justin Bieber as a prisoner. None of them are deployed in service of a thesis. The source material, Ric Browde's autobiographical novel While I'm Dead Feed the Dog, has been disavowed by its author, who found the adaptation unfaithful to his book. That is a rare distinction. A man wrote down his life, sold it, and then publicly asked for it back.

The critical record is unambiguous: a zero percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 18 on Metacritic. This is not a film that offends by preaching. It offends, where it offends at all, by refusing to mean anything. Every marker of contemporary social consciousness sits at nothing, and the emptiness is total instead of selective. We are left with a relic of a bygone disposition, a comedy that asks nothing of its audience but a willingness to watch a young man pursue a wager. There is something almost restful in that. Almost.