Teen Spirit

It's 1995, the tech generation is just around the corner and so is Riya Young's adulthood. A flannel-clad slacker with no time for morons, Riya clings to a life defined by Gen X, grunge music and the sweet naïveté of youth. Adulthood brings this 16 year old not the promise of excitement but the lurking threat of an adult plight: depression.

We first encounter Riya at her favorite haunt, the GP's office, convinced that she has caught hepatitis from a subway station toilet. Riya's historic neuroses have reached their apex since she started showing signs of depression – spontaneous crying, anxiety attacks – an illness that is slowly unraveling her father.

Henry Young, Riya's dad, is a successful pharmaceutical researcher who has taken to falling asleep at the dinner table and acting out at work. It soon becomes apparent that Dr. Young is self-medicating his depression. As Henry's addiction progresses, his wife and kids try to maintain the façade of a well-adjusted family.

Riya and her brother, Chris, only really emerge from this pretense in the presence of one another. Close in age and with similar interests, they bask in their own personal dialect of pop culture allusions. "The retarded twins," so-named by their mother, discuss everything on a level plane, from anxiety to Riya's STD phobia.

Despite her fear of copulation and her anti-conformist behavior, Riya finds herself lusting after teen America's ideal boyfriend: the high school jock. He may not be the star player, nor is he particularly smart, but Koji sure looks cute in basketball shorts. Riya decides she has found the antidote to a life like her dad's: sex with Koji will prove she has the capacity to be as carefree as the promiscuous cheerleaders around her.

Riya's best friend, Sam, is neither as uptight as her friend nor as liberal as her mother. She blames Riya's sexual angst on socialized "Christian guilt" and agrees to help her seduce Koji. Together they buy condoms, watch Koji train and attend parties thrown by the populariat. The approach seems to work as Koji starts to take notice of Riya. After doling out some quasi-helpful advice to him for an English assignment, our heroine finally snags a date.

The night of her date, Riya's father collapses at work. Riya is torn between doing her daughterly duties and missing her one chance at landing Koji in the sack. Racked with guilt, she chooses to keep her date to avoid confronting her father's drug addiction. After a predictably mediocre evening at East Side Mario's, she is rewarded with a kiss to the strains of the Pixies.

A few days after her father's collapse, Riya suffers a panic attack in the middle of an exam. That evening she finally admits to her mother her fears of becoming like her father. Mom tries to comfort her by suggesting she take anxiety medication, but Riya prickles at the idea of taking drugs to be "normal."

Riya still has a shot at being normal without meds. Koji has invited her over to watch a movie while his parents are out of town. After deciding on Before Sunrise, the couple starts making out feverishly to the tune of Kath Bloom's "Come Here." Then Riya stops, suddenly able to grasp her situation clearly: Koji is an idiot, a beautiful idiot, but still an idiot. Riya proceeds to unceremoniously abandon the bewildered jock and drive over to Sam's, where her friend applauds her restraint.

In the end, Koji starts dating a cheerleader, as all jocks are destined to do. Riya is unfazed as she has come to realize that sex is not the source of worldly division, intelligence is. "These days I divide the world into stupid and smart," she says, acceding that intelligence can sometimes dabble in idiocy.

The movie ends with Riya in a psychiatrist's office, flanked by her entire family. "I'm starting to think my mom was right," Riya says in the closing voiceover, "Perhaps inspired eccentricity is better than dull sanity. At least I hope it is. Or else we're fucked – and not in a good way."