Even though it's a comedy of sorts, when Charlize Theron stumbles and stalks through Jason Reitman's Young Adult, she's not playing it for laughs. Diablo Cody's screenplay about Mavis Gray (Theron), a walking disaster of a 37-year-old woman who has mentally never quite left the Darwinian battlefield of the high school cafeteria, has a good share of funny lines, mostly at Mavis's expense. But instead of taking her character's dipsomaniacal misbehavior as an excuse to play it big, bitchy, and goofy (the Cameron Diaz model), Theron delivers the deadened glare that she perfected in Monster. Her Mavis is a selfish terror with an endless array of bad habits whom the film is somehow able to use both for shocked laughs and eventually pity. This isn't dysfunction, it's insanity.
Mavis lives in arrested development semi-squalor in a Minneapolis high-rise where she crashes out in manic-depressive slumber to the background noise of trash reality television. Occasionally she rouses herself to ghost-write another book in a once-popular young adult series, but otherwise it's binge-drinking, random encounters with random men (kept conspicuously faceless by Reitman, as she won't remember them anyway) and brooding. This grim roundelay is fractured by the arrival of an email birth announcement from her now-married high school boyfriend Buddy Slade, a development that sends her first into a self-reflecting panic and resolves into laser-focused determination: Mavis decides to drive back to her small home town of Mercury, Minnesota and wrench Buddy away from a marriage that she's convinced herself has made him into a "hostage."
Immediately keyed in to Mavis's horrible delusion is Matt Frehauf (Patton Oswalt), whom she doesn't remember even though his locker was next to hers in high school. Although he lashes Mavis with sarcasm as they drink in a Mercury dive or in his garage (where he distills high-grade bourbon that she swigs like it's water), Matt is stuck in a high school loop of his own, having been beaten up by jocks who thought he was gay and left hobbling around on a cane emblazoned with punk stickers. He is frozen just like Mavis is, wearing the T-shirts of the bands of his youth (Replacements, Black Flag), though she pours out her adolescent fixations differently, writing the protagonist of her novel as the beautiful, misunderstood, above-it-all queen that she imagines herself to have been. "Psycho prom queen bitch" is another take on Mavis, provided by a friend of Buddy's wife, who seems not to know that Mavis is aimed at her husband like a missile.
Buddy is played by Patrick Wilson with his usual decency and charm flecked with cluelessness. Seeing Mavis cluelessly fling herself at him in one over-the-top outfit after another (heels, hair extensions, and extreme makeup, like she's playing grown-up Barbie with herself) moves quickly from low-grade humor to eyes-averting embarrassment. Cody's smart but not overly-clever screenplay (there's none of the showy excess of Juno here) nuances Mavis's behavior as sharply as Theron does, slowly pulling back the curtain on what initially seemed like a woman who was immature and simply never grew out of her mean-girl phase to somebody who is actually mentally ill. The way Theron looks at the people around her, whether it's Matt trying to talk her out of this ill-fated seduction routine or Buddy's wife trying to make conversation, is something akin to how an alien would view humanity. Mavis knows these people are talking, but no matter what they say, it can't penetrate the paranoid shell of her self-regard. There does come a moment where it seems possible that Mavis might learn a lesson, but Reitman's downbeat directing doesn't leave much hope for that development. This is the teenage mentality, persecution complexes and score-settling, as permanent affliction.
