High School Not a Musical: Very realistic - for the most part - movie about high-school kids

Although it's a pretty slight movie all in all and covers very familiar ground - yet another movie (based on what is no doubt a very sensitive and readable novel) about high-school kids mixing with the "wrong crowd" and maturing as they prepare to take the big step toward graduation and college - The Spectacular Now stands out among the rest as being far more realistic and credible than we've come to expect from feature films about youth. The kids - particular the two leads, one a seriously addicting fun-loving popular guy and the other a serious and focused girl who's not in the "cool" crowd but is not, thankfully, a loner or outsider - who come together on a "cute meet" (he wakes passed out on her front lawn as she's about to begin her paper route - it's a cute meet, sure, but also relevant to the plot). Their awkward and flirtatious conversations seem very real, even the sex scene, tentative and a bit clumsy and not at all graphical, seems about as real as any teen sex scene on film. A real strength of the movie is how they each grow and change, influenced by each other, but not entirely in positive ways: he brings her out of her shell a bit, but it's not such a great sign that she can match him in drinking, and we sense her uneasiness; he, on the other hand, sees - especially during a very painful visit to his estranged father (played completely against expectations by the coach from Friday Night Lights - so interesting that he's appearing in piece about high-school kids coming to maturity and in a antithetic role) - the kind of person he will become if he continues with his drinking and his careless attitude toward women - and yet he can't quite help himself, either. In other words, this movie defies convention and expectation, to a large degree. On the downside, this movie like many others has absolutely no clue as to how middle-class kids in this kind of high school apply to, think about, and talk about college; and, unfortunately, a few of the scenes are so painfully wrong - the dinner at the home of his wealthy sister, the confrontation with the class president/star athlete - that they stand out against the many very fine and true moments in this movie.