The Spectacular Now (2013)

James Ponsoldt's The Spectacular Now is a coming-of-age romance that behaves like a well-mannered guest at a party, arriving on time, saying little, and leaving before anyone can form a strong opinion about it. Sutter drinks, charms, and drifts. Aimee studies, worries, and loves him anyway. The film observes both with a patience that critics in 2013 found soulful, and the observation holds up. It also means the movie carries almost no ideological freight. This is a white, middle-American story about a boy who cannot stop pouring whiskey into a plastic cup, and it tells that story without a thesis.

The traces of contemporary sensibility are faint and largely incidental. Supporting actors of color appear in the margins and are never asked to carry meaning. Aimee has ambitions of her own and chooses Philadelphia without the screenplay turning her decision into an argument. The casting favors faces that look lived-in over faces that look airbrushed, which reviewers at the time applauded as realism. None of this amounts to a program. It amounts to good instincts, and instincts do not a movement make.

The absences are more instructive. There is no racial consciousness, no environmental anxiety, no indictment of the economy that keeps Sutter's boss down to one employee, no queer thread, no neurodivergent character, and no attempt to revise the historical record, there being no history to revise. Race is simply not a subject. Class is a texture. The film's only real moral position is that drinking yourself unconscious on a stranger's lawn at eighteen is a problem, and it declines to shout even that. We are left with a modest, humane, well-acted picture that resists the era's vocabulary almost entirely. It is the cinematic equivalent of a shrug delivered with genuine warmth.