Whatever the institution, college is, as anyone who’s matriculated will attest, almost always as much about the social experience as the educational value. It’s the intermediate weigh station between the silly, insular, sewing-circle politics of high school and the crushing, rat-race actuality of real life, and who hasn’t entertained a prolongation of that experience? Moreover, what if there were no institutional controls in place, and you could while away your time with classes that consisted of skateboarding, daydreaming, rock ’n’ roll posing, “Wingman-ing 101” and girl-watching?, an inveterate dreamer and graduating high-school senior who, after getting rejected by every university to which he applies, creates a fake college to serve as a temporary refuge for him and some friends. Several of B’s friends opt in on his scheme, and together they design a fake Web site for the school and secure a brick-and-mortar location courtesy of a local abandoned mental hospital. Voila! Like that, the South Harmon Institute of Technology is born (and yes, that acronym abbreviation gets a full workout). B’s lifelong best friend, Sherman (<A href=)
Jonah Hill), actually gets into a nearby school as a legacy, but helps his pal by convincing his burnout uncle, Ben (Lewis Black), to pose as the college’s dean in a meet and greet with B’s parents.
In an amusingly capricious twist, though, Sherman has accidentally activated a chirpy “Acceptance is only one click away!” link on the aforementioned Web site, and soon, dozens of other college rejects from out of town show up for classes. Naturally, because there has to be a girl, B falls for Monica (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ Blake Lively), and naturally, because there has to be a villainous dean of a nearby competing college who is angling for a consolidation of space in a land grab, there’s the sneering Dean Van Horne (The Silence of the Lambs’ Anthony Heald). Against considerable odds, B and his friends forge ahead with maintaining a fake but quasi-functional university, one that operates by their own set of liberal rules.
As the co-screenwriter of deeply loved cult comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink helped locate the unique humor in both violently clashing cultures and slacker ethos, and you’ll see some of that same idiosyncratic stamp of personality on this, his directorial debut. Still, despite Pink’s best efforts, the movie’s narrative track is not a particularly well-oiled one. Adults are generally either sternly hectoring or oblivious (sometimes a scene calls for both), and the character of Uncle Ben never codifies into something more than a one-note counterpoint to these cardboard types.
Still, if audiences turn off their brains, they can have some fun. Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Mark Perez’s script is all synthetic, but what Accepted most has going for it is a few pockets of genuine energy. These are provided chiefly by Long — a gifted young comedic actor who also astutely locates the frustrated rectitude in his character — and Hill, who conveys the antsy anxiety of bottled-up adolescence through a collection of pithy one-liners (“This place is great, because I can finally get hepatitis,” he says of scouting the abandoned mental facility that becomes South Harmon) and constipated physicality. He’s the friend you had in high school that always considered the after-effects of your latest harebrained scheme — a reluctant voice of conscience by virtue of indoctrination. (For an interview with Steve Pink, meanwhile, click here.) (Universal, PG-13, 93 minutes)