Film: Adventureland

Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.

The movie is breezy and well-observed, but also deeply conventional. It may poke fun at a tacky nightclub called Razzmatazz, which bills itself as “A sophisticated meeting place”, but the film is hardly Sentimental Education.

Like Superbad, it focuses on hormonal teenagers whiling away a long summer (when will this genre give the other seasons a look-in?), but swaps the earlier picture’s bawdiness for whimsy. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is an earnest literature graduate (“I read poetry for pleasure, sometimes”) who spends six weeks manning Adventureland’s hoopla stall when his parents’ financial woes put paid to his European travel plans. The misery of his surroundings (you can almost smell the corn dogs and candy floss) is alleviated by the attentions of Em (Kristen Stewart), a proto-indie-kid who is secretly sleeping with the park’s slick engineer, Mike (Ryan Reynolds). A love triangle begins to take shape against a backdrop which may be the perfect metaphor for adolescence - all those alluring but tawdry waltzers and swing-rides spinning round and round in delirious, nausea-inducing circles.

Mottola, directing matter-of-factly from his own autobiographical screenplay, achieves a brisk pace that goes some way toward compensating for the over-familiar material; each minor character, from the oaf reliving the night he played a Rush drum solo, to the brace of mini-Madonnas who break into synchronised dance routines at the drop of a stiletto, gets a chance to shine. And the game cast give it their all, particularly Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as Adventureland’s oddball owners, and the leads, Eisenberg and Stewart, who should be commended for good work against the odds. James and Em are the blandest characters here - he’s heartfelt and conscientious, she’s the screw-up who needs him to set her straight. (All she’s missing is an addiction to self-harming.) But Stewart has found some new ways to play enigmatic vagueness, while Eisenberg, whose similar roles in Roger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale make him a plausible challenger for Michael Cera’s title of Alpha Nerd, is never less than winning.

The script delivers the occasional fresh moment - like James taking the rap for his father’s secret stash of booze - but mostly you know what you’re getting: dope is good, Harvard is evil, parents are weird, and things were never the same again after that summer. It’s the sort of film where you count the minutes between the first mention of a woman’s wig and the moment when she has it torn off her head. (I made it just over an hour, which passes for restraint.)

At least the picture goes through those motions to a killer soundtrack which runs from The Velvet Underground, Hüsker Dü and The Jesus and Mary Chain all the way to the horror that is Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” (which provides the movie’s best running gag). The real star is Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Park, where Adventureland was shot, an actual theme park founded in 1898. If there’s any justice, it will take its place on the coach tour of Pennsylvania Movie Locations, if such a thing exists, alongside the steelworks in The Deer Hunter and the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead.

• Adventureland is released Sep 11