ACCEPTED

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Special Education

Losers Teach Each Other

By Cole Smithey

Steve Pink’s directorial debut (he made his name by writing John Cusack’s diamond-sharp black comedy “Grosse Pointe Blank”) is a slight but punchy comedy about college-age misfits.

It starts out gangbusters before sliding down a gel-coated narrative slope into a duller-than-dirt third act.

Sadly, its dismal conclusion cancels out most of the preceding laughs. Inspired comic performances from a slew of young actors adds to the film's fun vibe of freewheeling youth.

High school senior Bartleby (Justin Long) is a clever guy whose marginal grades result in rejection letters from every college he applies. Desperate for validation from his disappointed parents (Ann Cusack and Mark Derwin) Bartleby invents a phony Ohio college that accepts him as a “student.” Bartleby’s audacious and increasingly inventive hoax prompts he and his fellow college reject pals to renovate a disused mental hospital to house their “South Harmon Institute of Technology,” which they pose as a “sister college” to an actual Harmon College a few blocks away.

Unfortunately, as fate and comedy writers would have it, a glitch in the bogus college’s website unexpectedly reels in a hoard of like-minded slackers who install themselves in the dorm-only campus. What starts out as a façade of higher education soon becomes a genuine center of alternative education, with its own swimming pool and a skateboard half-pipe, whose curriculum is devised and taught by its students.

Because American counterculture movies have barely surfaced in mainstream cinema over the past 20-plus years, “Accepted” comes off like a desperate gasp for breath. The film’s comic foundation is sound but its execution stumbles because screenwriters (Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, and Mark Perez) don’t deliver enough witty dialogue to keep up with its spastic tone. The casting of novice actors contributes to the failure of the production.

Jerry Zucker’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (1979) is a good example of a similarly themed movie that mined the rebelliousness of academic underachievers for comic and musical wealth, thanks in part to punk rock legends the Ramones. There’s a Zucker-inspired moment in “Accepted” when Bartleby jumps on stage with a band at a blowout party to take over singing duties on a version of the Ramones’ anthem “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Bartleby euphorically sings the famous lines, “They’re forming in a straight line, they’re going through a tight wind, the kids are losing their minds, blitzkrieg bop.” This musical climax connects the pent-up frustration of countless lost generations of social rejects to the movie’s underlying anger.

Uncle Ben (Lewis Black of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”) steals the movie as a fiercely blunt anti-authoritarian social renegade who Bartleby enlists as Dean and sole faculty member of his South Harmon Institute. Ben declares the film’s theme when he utters the immortal words, “What is learning? It’s paying attention. It’s opening yourself up to this great big ball of &%$@ that we call life.” Ben happens to be the eccentric uncle of Bartleby’s best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) who suffers hazing rituals at a fraternity at the authentic Harmon College. Sherman takes the brunt of most of the jokes, but we never get to see enough of his personality to embrace him as the protagonist’s alter ego the writers intended him to be.

"Accepted” falls short of mining “National Lampoon’s Animal House” brand of humor because it doesn’t relate the relationships of its characters to their kooky behaviors. We’re told that Bartleby’s crony Hands (Columbus Short) was a star high-school football player before an injury sidelined him into a college career as a sculptor of African-inspired artworks featuring surprisingly enormous phalluses.

Sure, the art pieces are amusing, but there’s no attempt to tie Hand’s sports-obsessed mind to his artistic sensibility. It’s just one of many examples of how characters with the potential for life of their own are kept in vacuum-packed hermetic bubbles of comic potential.

In the course of creating his confabulation Bartleby finally finds his calling. The South Harmon Institute of Technology gets accredited by the city. It’s a happy moment that’s entirely predictable. It’s also unforgivably unfunny.

Rated PG-13. 92 mins.