'We accept the love we think we deserve.'

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2013)

Major question: why did this perfectly crafted, intelligently written and acted, touching little film not get nominated for an Oscar? It has all the ingredients of one of the finest films of the year - script based on the writer's own novel by the same name and directed by him, too - Stephen Chbosky - and a superb cast of young actors (and some excellent veteran actors such as Joan Cusack and Dylan McDermot and Paul Rudd, all playing against the slot roles into which others have stuck them), and makes many points about teenage angst and how the schism between teenagers and adults has become a chasm rarely navigable. But, as in current terminology, 'go figure!'
Very briefly, the story set in the early 1990s in Pittsburgh is about 15-year-old Charlie (20 year old Logan Lerman), an endearing and naïve outsider, coping with first love, the suicide of his best friend, and his own mental illness while struggling to find a group of people with whom he belongs. The introvert freshman is taken under the wings of two seniors, Sam (22 year old Emma Watson) and Patrick (19 year old Ezra Miller), who are step-siblings and welcome him to the real world. Into this ménage enter Brad (Johnny Simmons), the football hero who happens to be a deeply closeted gay boy in an affair with the openly gay Patrick, Charlie's sister Candace (Nina Dobrey) and her abusive boyfriend Ponytale Derek (Nicholas Braun), Charlie's parents (Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh), the influential English teach Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd) and the psychiatrist Dr. Burton (Joan Cusack).
The story is complex as Charlie writes to his 'friend' and slowly reveals the secrets of his background that make him a loner 'who finds loneliness unbearable, a friend who feels his friends deserve better than they get but cannot bring himself to feel that he does too. He can rise fiercely to the occasion when his friends are threatened but is as fragile as glass when the secrets he carries buried deep inside threaten to overwhelm him.' The manner in which each of the characters change in the course of this story manages to be at once credible as well as entertaining. This is a deeply touching film that deserves a very wide audience. One of the finest films of 2012.
Grady Harp