At the LFF: "It's Kind of a Funny Story"

Easy to have It's Kind of a Funny Story pegged as the Half Nelson team (namely writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) go mainsteam - and indeed, compared to that partnership's quietly observational lead-off projects, it is kind of a funny story, based on pre-existing material (a 2006 novel by Ned Vizzini), eminently marketable as a teen movie, and with the beardy dude from The Hangover in a prominent role. Admirers of Half Nelson and Sugar should, however, be reassured by the sight of the filmmakers bringing their usual subtlety and sure formal and narrative touch to bear on their source.

Their latest hero Craig (Keir Gilchrist) is a nervy, pallid high schooler, cursed with a whirring mind and a churning stomach - his occasional bouts of projectile vomiting either the first indication of the directors' unexpected move into gross-out comedy (the beardy dude from The Hangover hasn't even shown up yet), or an authentic symptom of this particular malady. It's to Boden and Fleck's credit that these early scenes give us a sense of what's eating their protagonist (as well as what he's eaten) without overselling his predicament. In a mainstream teenpic, there'd be a major flip-out around the corner, but IKOAFS offers a gradual build-up of commonplace, below-the-radar concerns: the pressure to get into a particular summer school, a lack of self-confidence, something about the girl of Craig's dreams, who naturally turns out to be nothing of the sort.

After causing an incident on the Brooklyn Bridge - or thoughts about causing an incident on the Brooklyn Bridge; Boden and Fleck don't even want to make a big deal out of this - our boy checks himself into a psychiatric facility. There are a few early bumps: an unsettling midnight-hour encounter with a doctor who turns out to be a fellow patient (Zach Galifianakis, the beardy dude from The Hangover), being assigned to the same room as - in Craig's words - "a depressed, middle-aged Egyptian dude", finding out the traditionally twitchy Jeremy Davies is only on the staff. Nevertheless, it's here that Craig starts to equip himself with a support network, and comes in turn to provide support to others who, it turns out, need it a good deal more than he himself does.

If there's a connection with the directors' past work, it lies in this emphasis on personal growth, and the way Boden and Fleck observe closely and sympathetically as the protagonist adapts to cope with the changing environment around him. Gilchrist's central performance is, in its own way, very nearly as impressive as the slow, calibrated adjustments imposed upon Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson or Algenis Perez Soto in Sugar, sharply attuned to the gradual, hard-gained progress his character is making. He's nudged along nicely by Galifianakis, doing wacko and washed-out in a rather more realistic key than he's hitherto been permitted; by the increasingly noteworthy Emma Roberts, as a self-harmer who opens new doors for our hero; and by Viola Davis as the patient therapist we'd all like to visit on a weekly basis.

The funny bits in Funny Story are chiefly cutaways to Craig's gloomy mental projections - legitimate visions to him, amusingly off-kilter to better-balanced observers: the exception is a glam-rock fantasia, set to Queen/Bowie's "Under Pressure", which marks a crucial breakthrough in the patient's self-belief. Beneath the blithe breeziness, however, sits a serious, socially committed film, its beady eye set on an issue that has been spiralling out of control these past few decades. Boden and Fleck display not just a deep understanding of the mounting pressures facing our young, but a touching commitment - made most evident in the concluding photo-montage - to finding ways to put their characters back on something like the right track; and actually the filmmakers' chosen aesthetic makes their call for America's youth to live in the moment doubly sincere and heartfelt. Plenty of teen movies over the years have served as a pick-me-up: the cinematic equivalent of scoffing an entire bag of Haribo in one sitting. This very likable work is one of the few that might legitimately be described as therapeutic.

It's Kind of a Funny Story screens at the Vue West End on Tue 19, Wed 20 and Thu 21.