It Tries, But Has No Base

Rating: 3/10 (6 March 2017)

I hate to see a movie like this. I really, really do. "Perks of Being A Wallflower" tries oh so hard to make itself emotionally relevant, but ultimately fails in that regard because it has no "base" to fall back on.
For a basic plot summary, this movie tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman), a new high school freshman who epitomizes the word "wallflower". Soon upon his arrival into high school, however, Charlie is taken under the wings of Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson), who show him how to live it up and let go of some of his inhibitions.
The main trouble with this movie (minor spoilers ahead) is that I feel the storytelling is backwards and thus the narrative never really plays out in any meaningful way. It's almost like the character development comes at the very end of the movie, when the characters have already been on screen for a long, long time. Thus, when the "big emotional payoff" actually comes to fruition, it really doesn't because for so long the characters were just kind of floating along without a solid base.
This whole experience strikes me as a prime example of "the book being better than the movie". I haven't read the book, but I'd almost bet money that it does a much better job of conveying the adolescent message than this movie does. This is even despite the fact that I thought the acting was actually pretty good. That wasn't the problem....the problem was the overall tone and plot devices.
Thus, I couldn't get into "Perks of Being A Wallflower" whatsoever because I didn't feel for the characters until the very end, and by then it was just too late. My exact star rating would be more like 1.5, but I bump it up a little because I think there was a sincere effort here to create a good movie. It just didn't work for me.