Paper Towns (2015)
Certified: 109 minutes
Directed by: Jack Schreier
Starring: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Halston Sage, Austin Abrams, Justice Smith, Jaz Sinclair, Griffin Freeman, Caitlin Carver, Cara Buono, Susan Macke Miller, Tom Hillmann, Meg Crosbie, Jim Coleman
KRS Releasing Ltd

Nat Wolff is Quentin Jacobsen, aka Q, who is currently a senior at Orlando high school. He is best friends with Marcus Lincoln (Justice Smith), aka Radar, and Ben Starling (Austin Abrams).

As a kid he had been good friends with Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), who lived in the house in front of his. Today things are different as she is now the school’s most popular girl and it seems she barely knows he exists. But life takes a different turn when she ends up in his bedroom and asks him to be her driver as she needs to right nine wrongs she did in her past.

Q agrees when he realises that her boyfriend Jase (Griffin Freeman) is no longer in the picture as she caught him cheating on her.

After a night of revenge-fuelled action, Margo does not appear at school the following day.

It is believed she has run away from home but Q believes otherwise. He sees a Woody Guthrie poster in her room and thinks it is a clue. Radar wants to help but he is more fixated on losing his virginity to Angela (Jaz Sinclair), while Ben wants to take Margo’s best friend Lacey (Halston Sage) to the prom.

Q realises that Margo is in ‘paper town’, a fictitious place in New York, and the five youths set off on a road trip with the intention of finding Margo and return for the prom on time.

Novelist John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars was adapted into a movie and became a phenomenon hit with a very small budget. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the writing team that adapted The Fault in Our Stars, are on board here, which continues to highlight both the author’s work and the duo’s ability.

The characters look and sound real

This young adult-aimed movie has an interesting premise. The characters look and sound real and it will be very difficult for the audience not to empathise with them. They look like teenagers in the real world and not prefabricated ones.

The film showcases an interesting makeover for British supermodel Delevingne, who makes a strong screen impact. While still looking beautiful, the emphasis is not on her features but more on her character and the film keeps her anchored in its sense of teenage realism.

Paper Towns reminded me of the late John Hughes classic coming-of-age movies as it delivers that bittersweet coating to a story where teenagers will take that all important step in life and the bridge between infatuation and love is crossed.

The film opens slowly, letting us see the world through the eyes of Wolff’s Q, showing a reality that is both revelatory and poignant. Wolff is perfect in his role and emerges as a sort of Dustin Hoffman from The Graduate era.

Overall, Paper Towns is a light, sweet and very much self-aware movie that is much stronger than its title makes it out to be.

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