It is bracing to watch Michael Cera, leading contender for World’s Most Lovable Young Person, play a character with an ugly soul. Nick Twisp, the whimsically solipsistic hero of “Youth in Revolt,” is also, in moments of clarity, its villain. This is expressed in a literal sense when Nick calls into being a dastardly French alter ego named Francois, bearing a sinister pencil mustache. Cera’s Francois is wonderfully funny, every word and gesture announcing casual contempt for humanity. He is also, in his honest depravity, more admirable than the real Nick, whose contempt for humanity is dressed up in the adorable clothing of puppy love and adolescent yearning.

For most of its running time, “Youth in Revolt” seems fully aware of the grotesque self-obsession that characterizes Nick. Director (and Wes alum) Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Gustin Nash, adapting C.D. Payne’s novel, give us a slimy, sardonic ode to the Revolting Youth that many people become at some point or another. There is a delicate poetry of fixation and willful romantic delusion in the images and in the succession of giddy pop songs. The whole story is about Nick’s determination to possess a girl on whom he has developed a crush; his attachment is cute at first but rapidly becomes a pretext for vicious conspiracies. Nick’s resentment and selfishness are presented sympathetically but also with clearness and sharp humor. There is a shimmering beauty in his fantasies—expressed nicely in a couple of cutely rickety stop-motion-animated interludes—but we know there is an awful void beneath them.

Yet, for all its charm and twisted insight, this is an odious film. The reason: it ends up insisting that Nick Twisp is just fine the way he is.
To be fair, Nick is put-upon; his parents are divorced, and his listlessly libidinous mother seems to keep him around as a means of obtaining child-support money. His self-protective outlook and obsession with sex have obviously not formed in a vacuum. Considering this, the film’s last-minute flailing to make Nick Twisp into a real hero, with a real happy ending and the puzzling assumption that he deserves it, is somewhat understandable as a misguided gesture of compassion; understandable, but not excusable—especially since the whole operation is so sloppy. It commences with Nick, after going into hiding from the police, watching a TV news report about himself. The boyfriend of his dream-girl, a self-important rich boy, is interviewed and makes some snobbish comment about it being better for Nick to be in the hands of “the authorities.” “Sad music” plays. Really? Is that the best we can do—blame the authorities and cue the violins?

In the end, we get Nick Twisp the sort-of martyr and Nick Twisp getting the girl. The final words of Cera’s voice-over are something like, “Turns out that, in the end, just being Nick Twisp was enough.” Considering what we have learned about Nick Twisp, this platitude seems desperately odd. Since Nick Twisp is, by nearly any standard, a moral failure, those words must be meant to apply to the general human condition—perhaps a suggestion that we should all accept ourselves as we are. Don’t bother with remorse or making amends if, like Nick Twisp, you have caused destruction and hurt others, sometimes deliberately. You are enough. I’m pretty sure this is what Nick Twisps wants to be told. (I should know—I’ve been one and revert periodically.) I’m also pretty sure that a meaningless ego-boost is the last thing a Nick Twisp needs.