Everyone in The Wackness tries so very, very hard to be risqué that there isn’t a moment in which the movie isn’t posturing. Centered on a recent high-school graduate selling marijuana in 1994 New York City, The Wackness stars Josh Peck, desperately trying to shed his kiddie image from Nickelodeon’s “Drake & Josh.” As Luke Shapiro, the teen dealer, Peck lowers his eyelids to half mast and speaks in the lingo of the era: “I’m mad depressed, yo.” To combat that depression, Luke meets with a psychiatrist played by Ben Kingsley. Luke trades drugs for couch time, which means there are plenty of “shocking” scenes in which Kingsley takes to a bong. I don’t know how much of The Wackness is autobiographical – writer-director Jonathan Levine did grow up in Manhattan in the 1990s – but the movie’s scent of nostalgic self-glorification is stronger than that of pot.
