Netflix Flick of the Week: “Stuck in Love”

Written and directed by Josh Boone (the director of the highly anticipated film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. See our review here.), Stuck in Love (2012) was Boone’s debut, and a star-studded one at that.

I’m kind of obsessed with family resemblances, and the casting is pretty spot-on there. The Mortal Instruments’ Lily Collins radiates confidence as Samantha, and Nat Wolff’s Rusty, as Sam’s younger brother, is an endearing stoner-wallflower. Both resemble their mother, played by Jennifer Connelly. Oh, and Kristen Bell plays the neighbor that the novelist father is having casual sex with! The film is about love (obviously), realism versus romance, and writers.

Samantha and Rusty grew up in the kind of house where their dad, novelist William Borgens (Greg Kinnear), would pay them to write in their journals, and sure enough, both of them have inherited their father’s writing talents. Even though I hate Samantha for getting a book published while in college, she is the one who tells her father he can’t behave like that when she finds out he has been spying on his ex-wife. Samantha is a realist, and somehow Collins plays her as sophisticated (if often cocky), even when she refuses to talk to her own mother.

Rusty is the hopeless romantic, and his writing forms the opening lines of the movie (“I remember that it hurt. Looking at her hurt.”). I would call his father, William, a hopeless romantic too, with the way that he stalks his ex-wife, Erica—but he has sex with Kristen Bell’s Tricia often enough to forgo that title.

And yet, when Erica accuses him of being in denial about everything, I agree with her; when she comes to his house in distress about their daughter, you can easily see that he thought she came back for him. Stuck in Love has such beautifully heartbreaking moments that made me love it.

Logan Lerman plays baby-faced fellow writing student Lou who “reeks of romance and good intentions” according to Samantha, and has the nice guy thing going for him while she’s a rather cynical manic pixie dream girl. Eventually, though, she admits, “You make me feel less cynical.”

And that’s not a spoiler because these characters and their relationships go through all sorts of developments and grow throughout the story. This film is very character-driven, not plot-driven, but it is exciting, heartbreaking, and surprising. The soundtrack is also pretty stellar, featuring Conor Oberst and Elliot Smith.

The film has an average rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars on Netflix.