THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER
Stephen Chbosky | 2012 | USA | 1h43m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER is one of those rare coming-of-age films that understands how intensely important everything feels when you’re young. Friendship, embarrassment, music, first love, family, loneliness. Stephen Chbosky builds the film around those small emotional shifts rather than forcing adolescence into a neat lesson.
Logan Lerman plays Charlie, a shy high-school freshman carrying more grief and anxiety than he knows how to express. His life begins to change when he befriends Patrick and Sam, played by Ezra Miller and Emma Watson, two older students who pull him into their circle of parties, mixtapes, theatre productions and late-night drives through Pittsburgh. Their friendship gives Charlie a way into the world, but it also forces him to confront the parts of his past he has tried to keep buried.
Chbosky adapted the film from his own bestselling novel, which gives it an unusual closeness to the source material. The details that made the book so beloved are still there: handwritten letters, mixtapes, cult screenings of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and the feeling that discovering the right song at the right age can alter your entire sense of self.
The soundtrack does a lot of the emotional work. David Bowie, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins and New Order sit alongside the film’s own fictional mixtapes, giving the story the texture of adolescence before streaming flattened music discovery into an endless scroll. The famous tunnel sequence set to Bowie’s “Heroes” has become one of the defining images of 2010s teen cinema for exactly that reason. It captures the brief conviction that your friends, your music and the city around you might be enough to make life feel limitless.
The cast is excellent across the board, but Lerman is particularly good at keeping Charlie vulnerable without making him passive. Watson brings warmth to Sam, while Miller makes Patrick funny and emotionally bruised in equal measure.
More than a decade after its release, THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER has become a genuine generational comfort film. For people who grew up with it, this screening is partly nostalgia. For anyone discovering it for the first time, it remains a thoughtful, funny and deeply empathetic film about finding the people who make surviving adolescence feel possible.
Special thanks must go to our star employee Murat for choosing this film for this week's program. If you enjoy it please remember to tip your bar man!
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LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.
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FOMO Secret Cinema • Bazari Orbeliani, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
