The Robert Downey Jr. Film Guide: Charlie Bartlett (2008)

A wealthy teen manages to fit in at his new high school by playing psychiatrist to fellow students.

Nathan Gardner, a world-weary high school principal who’s losing control in every aspect of his life.

Alternates between disheveled and stern.

Everybody needs to vent a little now and again, don’t you figure? Some of us are privileged enough to vent to you in the boys’ room stalls and the rest of us have to settle for less conventional methods. Like, I don’t know, a bottle of booze and a handgun.

Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Kat Dennings

Hope Davis in Captain America: Civil War.

I think that films like this are taking a more honest tack on what’s really been going on all along in [high school] ... I love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and one of the first books I ever read was Catcher in the Rye. I appreciate a story that accurately captures a pap smear of a generation. It seems as if this one’s got these post-Gen-Xers down.

Present day (2008), Connecticut.

Released in theaters 22 February 2008. Available on DVD in region 1, 2, 3 and 4.

55% fresh | 121 reviews

David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle: Downey is credible as the self-loathing Principal Gardner. For the most part, he mumbles and mopes through his role between swigs of booze until a final, over-the-top scene toward the end that only a really great actor like Downey could pull off. Why? Because with any merely competent actor, you wouldn’t believe the scene for a minute.

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Robert Downey Jr.—who might have played Charlie back in the ‘80s—is ruefully funny as the harried principal, a divorced alcoholic who is horrified to learn that his daughteris dating Charlie. As he has done in other films, Downey uses his real-life experience with drugs to inform his performance, which has a very serious undertone below its comedy.

1. This is the first serious character he’s ever played who attempts to be a responsible adult.
2. Need another film to complete a teen movie binge.

Ferris Bueller starts dealing drugs and the results teeter between comedy and drama without successfully being either.