Photograph by Phillip V. Caruso/Paramount Pictures and Mercury Productions. All rights reserved. 
 
 Click on the audio player below to listen to Slate's Spoiler Special podcast on Young Adult after you've seen the movie.* 
 
 Dan Kois Dan Kois edits and writes for Slate’s human interest and culture departments. He’s the co-author, with Isaac Butler, of The World Only Spins Forward, a history of Angels in America, and is writing a book called How to Be a Family. 
 
 December is the season of puffed-up Award Movies. Whether good or bad, War Horse and We Bought a Zoo and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy all have a prestige-y sameness to them. So consider Young Adult (Paramount)—a collaboration between the Juno tag team of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody—a sharp stick to puncture those bloated hopefuls. Young Adult doesn’t fully work, but it’s still one of the year’s most memorable movies, a ruthless portrait of a heroine with a serious love/loathe relationship with herself. 
 
 That’s Mavis Geary (Charlize Theron), a ghostwriter of a once-popular series of young-adult novels. For Monster, Theron gained weight and wore deglamorizing prosthetics and was rewarded with an Oscar. In Young Adult, she looks as great as she ever has, but she’s a monster nonetheless. Indeed, I prefer this performance—it’s sly and acid rather than spectacular. Spurred on by a birth announcement she interprets as a cry for help, Mavis returns from Minneapolis to her hometown of Mercury, Minn., intent on rescuing her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson) from a life of what she assumes to be parental misery. That Buddy seems perfectly happy does not matter a bit. “I’m a married man!” he protests at one point. “I know,” she coos in response. “We can beat this thing together.” 
 
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 Mavis has plenty of problems. Her series is getting canceled, and she’s having trouble writing the final volume. She drinks to excess. (Number of times we see Mavis pass out face-down in her clothes: four.) She seems convinced that back home in Mercury, the social order of high school remains firm; after a few days, she’s wearing her old clothes and cruising around town in her Cabriolet. (Of course she had a Cabriolet.) 
 
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 In high school, however, she would never have hung out with nerdy Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt). When she runs into Matt in a bar, she doesn’t recognize his name, even though they had lockers next to each other for four years. Matt, now a bookkeeper at a local restaurant, tags along on Mavis’ ridiculous quest, and their budding friendship, such as it is, makes for the film’s best scenes. As an actor, Oswalt—a brilliant stand-up—has come a long way since his days of standing completely frozen for an entire opening sequence of The King of Queens. In Young Adult, he’s funny, appealing, and touching, a bitter truth-teller to Theron’s glamorous, relentless fabulist. “You’re fucking mentally ill,” he says with dawning realization as she spins her future with Buddy into a story out of her teen romance novels. 
 
 What I enjoyed most about Young Adult is how it functions as an anti-romantic comedy. Scenes from the rom-com playbook—the meet-cute, the big confession, the first kiss, the pep talk from a friend—turn skewed and absurd, thanks to Mavis’ appalling lack of self-awareness. It’s reminiscent of 2009’s Seth Rogen-starring Observe and Report, which also employed an imbalanced main character to turn formulaic story beats into moments of creeping horror. Young Adult isn’t as rigorous as that film, which never shied away from the dark and awful ramifications of its premise. The ending of Young Adult, on the other hand, is tonally uncertain; my colleague Dana Stevens and I, for instance, have completely opposite interpretations of what happens in the final moments. 
 
 As with Observe, audiences aren’t likely to embrace Young Adult; after the screening I attended, everyone on the elevator (other than me) was visibly angry about the movie they’d just watched. But I admired Young Adult for its chutzpah and Theron for her go-for-broke performance. Most of all, I rejoiced in Diablo Cody’s deft, funny, angry script. Where Juno hid a conventional story under its jargon-studded, ostensibly subversive surface, Young Adult is genuinely radical (and hamburger-phone free). I’m happy that Cody has mined her own obsession with teenagedom—and her experience of being a minor celebrity—and turned it into something spikier and more uncompromising than I would have expected. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Cody’s happiness, but boy was I fascinated by Mavis’ misery. ||||| "Young Adult," the new collaboration from "Juno" director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, shares some stylistic notes with their earlier effort. It's set in Minnesota, features a pop-saturated soundtrack (including the Replacements), a woman-child stuck between adolescence and adulthood, and a droll appreciation of daily life in suburbia. Yet it's a step in a new direction, both for the creative team and for movies, a mature and humane comedy centered on a misanthropic female antihero. 
 
 Think of it as "Juno's" wicked stepsister. 
 
 Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a divorced writer (or as she prefers it, "author") of "Sweet Valley High"-style teen novels. Though she's 37, Mavis never really graduated from high school. Her Minneapolis high-rise apartment has the depressing, slumlike impermanence of a crash pad. Her social life consists of bad overnight hookups and lunches spent belittling former acquaintances with a catty former classmate who fled Mercury, Minn., for the big (well, biggish) city. 
 
 At once haughty and insecure, Mavis is a textbook case of arrested development. To top it off, she's still obsessed with her former high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Her fixation flares when Buddy's wife e-mails her an announcement welcoming their newborn child. 
 
 Mavis launches a mission to rescue Buddy from the bondage of family life, heedless of the fact that he's utterly content as a new dad. Equipped with an armory of makeup brushes, falsies and lethal little black dresses, she travels back to her hometown to reclaim her man. The comedy of awkwardness is honed to a stiletto edge. When two-faced Mavis, in slinky cocktail attire, seductively wheedles Buddy at a plaid-shirt sports bar, she's as out of place as a black widow on a slice of apple pie. 
 
 Looking on mockingly is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a wisecracking former classmate of Mavis and Buddy's. Though he's physically disabled from a brutal high school bullying attack, he's better adjusted than Mavis. As she pursues her romantic delusion to its bleak conclusion, the two misfits strike up an unlikely friendship. In Matt, Mavis discovers the one confidant who might have saved her from terminal self-absorption, if only she had met him when she was still young enough to change. 
 
 Edgy, subversive and hilariously embarrassing, "Young Adult" undercuts the conventions of female-centered comedies at each turn. It manages to keep us invested in the story despite focusing almost every scene on a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist. The supporting characters provide the homespun humanity Mavis lacks, especially Wilson as her Minnesota Nice former beau, and Elizabeth Reaser as his fun-loving wife. 
 
 Theron scores with a brave, darkly amusing performance as a onetime alpha female who sees life passing her by. She smiles charmingly while shooting death rays from her eyes. In her scenes with Oswalt, Theron drops her character's mean-girl bravado, revealing the fear, loneliness and confusion beneath her Revlon mask. 
 
 "Young Adult's" skepticism that Mavis can fan these flickers of self-awareness into a flame of understanding is a gauge of its sophistication. Cody and Reitman would rather close their film on a lifelike, unresolved note than force its characters into a contrived happy ending. Audiences may not embrace Mavis immediately -- she's too spiky for that. But there's little doubt that in time she'll join Marge Gunderson and Juno McGuff as another of Minnesota's enduring and iconic film characters. ||||| Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, “Young Adult” shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy. More radically than “J. Edgar” or even “Greenberg,” this movie, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman , challenges the dreary conventional wisdom that a movie protagonist must be likable. Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow. 
 
 When we first encounter her, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) seems to have grown, though perhaps not in the most constructive ways. Crossing the treacherous, unmarked boundary between her mid- and late-30s, Mavis has acquired some of the trappings and habits of adulthood. She lives in a spacious, slightly sterile high-rise apartment in Minneapolis (a Midwestern variant on the den of Manhattan anomie that Michael Fassbender’s sex-addled character inhabits in “Shame”) and has, for company, a fuzzy little dog and a big, flat-screen television permanently tuned to some Kardashian or another. 
 
 Eventually we hear about a divorce, though not much about the marriage that preceded it. Mavis supports herself by writing installments in a popular series of “Gossip Girl”-like novels for teenagers, and though her name does not appear on the cover, she derives some creative and professional satisfaction from the job. She drinks a lot, pulls at her hair and seems generally unconcerned with other people. She is pretty, poised and imperious in the way that can come naturally to tall, beautiful, blond women, but also weary and blue — a platinum princess suffering from metal fatigue. 
 
 Looking for a way to break out of her rut and return some luster to her life, Mavis decides to go back to her hometown, Mercury, Minn., and reconnect with her high school boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson). Just how spectacularly bad this idea is — how packed with vanity, magical thinking and plain, stupid meanness — emerges over the course of a few days, but the warning signs are there from the start. 
 
 Buddy, who is married, has just become a father for the first time. To Mavis, this can mean only that he is trapped in a domestic prison from which she must rescue him. And so she arrives in Mercury intent on breaking up his marriage, a plan she justifies to herself in the romantic language of destiny, soul mates and following your heart. 
 
 That is the native idiom of romantic fiction, both the kind Mavis writes and the genre she appears, at first glance, to inhabit. With sly understatement, Ms. Cody and Mr. Reitman (who previously collaborated on “Juno”) allow a set of comfortable expectations to emerge. We all know — from bad movies like “Cars,” say — that a big-city big shot on a visit to a small town will be constructively humbled by the simple, honest folks who live there. (Or else, as in “Straw Dogs,” terrorized by them). We are also conditioned to believe all kinds of contradictory claptrap about adolescence, which we are supposed to leave behind but also hold onto for (if I may show my own age by paraphrasing John Mellencamp) as long as we can. 
 
 One of the incidental pleasures of “Young Adult” is its specific sense of generational identity. The logos of bands like Black Flag, the Breeders and — of course, this being Minnesota — the Replacements serve as tokens of belonging and signifiers of nostalgia. On the road from Minneapolis to Mercury, Mavis plays an old mixtape (an actual cassette, by the way) from Buddy, fixating on “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub, which serves as the film’s ambiguous anthem. It evokes warm and affectionate memories, but also, in her case, the pathological inability to let go of the past. 
 
 We assume that a romantic comedy will turn on the redirection of desire from the wrong person to the right one. In one sense — I don’t want to say too much about the details of the plot — this expectation and all the others are met. Mavis does get something of a city mouse’s comeuppance; she does come to difficult terms with her vanished youth; and she does find her attention divided between two guys, the hunk who is her heart’s desire and the nerd who serves as a sympathetic ear and shoulder to cry on. But at the same time, the established codes of modern movie comedy are scrambled and subverted in ways that are puzzling, amusing, horrifying and ultimately astonishing. 
 
 The heroine in “Juno” was briefly dazzled by Jason Bateman’s cool, not-nice guy, but she eventually found her way back to the sweet loser played by Michael Cera. That was impeccable young adult logic, but “Young Adult” itself is a little more complicated, and much harsher. 
 
 Buddy is perfectly nice and not especially cool. The other guy, Matt (Patton Oswalt), is kind of prickly and cool in a geeky way. He makes his own action figures, distills his own bourbon (something Mavis especially appreciates) and has an awesome collection of ’90s indie-rock T-shirts. 
 
 He is also a reminder of the brutal underside of high school, which Mavis chooses to remember as a time of power and glory. Back when she was prom queen, he was in the hospital, having survived a horrific beating that left permanent physical damage. 
 
 And yet Mavis can look at him and complain, without irony, about how much she has suffered in her life. Her cruelty and self-pity are downright shocking. If Ms. Theron hadn’t already appeared in a film called “Monster” (for which she won an Oscar), that title might suit “Young Adult” just as well. 
 
 But even as this movie revels in the punitive spectacle of Mavis’s humiliation, it also extends her a measure of sympathy. Not by justifying her appalling behavior, but rather by treating her honestly. 
 
 Popular culture weaves a tapestry of beautiful lies. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” the Teenage Fanclub vocalist swears, over and over, in the chorus of “The Concept.” The book Mavis is working on (we hear snippets in voice-over) is full of paeans to its heroine’s pluck, luck and intelligence. Big-studio comedies lull us with smiles and fairy tales. The truth, in these circumstances, can be a painful shock, even when it makes you laugh. 
 
 “Young Adult” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Harsh language, bad sex, unpleasant situations — grown-up stuff, in other words. 
 
 YOUNG ADULT 
 
 Opens on Friday in Manhattan. 
 
 Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Diablo Cody; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana Glauberman; production design by Kevin Thompson; costumes by David C. Robinson; produced by Mr. Reitman, Ms. Cody, Russell Smith, Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich and Mason Novick; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Charlize Theron (Mavis Gary), Patton Oswalt (Matt Freehauf), Patrick Wilson (Buddy Slade), Elizabeth Reaser (Beth Slade), Jill Eikenberry (Hedda Gary) and Richard Bekins (David Gary).
– Young Adult, from the writer/director team behind Juno, stars Charlize Theron as a selfish thirtysomething returning to her hometown with the belief that she can win over her high school boyfriend—who's now married with a kid. Critics love it, though it can be hard to take: The film "systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about—for starters—high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota, and the capacity of human beings to change, learn, and grow," notes AO Scott in a New York Times' Critics' Pick review. "In this tale of stunted development, Theron is a comic force of nature, giving her character considerable density and humanity despite her monstrous aspects," observes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. "But fair warning: The laughs in Young Adult leave bruises." Several critics don't expect it to be an immediate fan favorite. "After the screening I attended, everyone on the elevator (other than me) was visibly angry about the movie they’d just watched. But I admired Young Adult for its chutzpah and Theron for her go-for-broke performance," writes Dan Kois in Slate. In the Star Tribune, Colin Covert agrees. "Audiences may not embrace Mavis," Theron's character, "immediately—she's too spiky for that. But there's little doubt that in time she'll join Marge Gunderson and Juno McGuff as another of Minnesota's enduring and iconic film characters."