Paper Towns is being aggressively sold on A) being in the vein of The Fault in Our Stars since they’re both from author John Green and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber; and B) the power of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. To the credit of Jake Schreirer’s adaptation, Paper Towns is neither. While it still heavily romanticizes teenage relationships, it does find honesty thanks to the terrific performances and odd moments that help breakthrough the pat valediction. More importantly, the movie takes down the MPDG rather than holding it up as an ideal role.

Quentin (Nat Wolff) has had a crush on his enigmatic, adventurous neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne) since they were kids. They’ve grown apart over the years, and he’s gone on to become a quiet, boring kid who admires her from afar. One night, she comes in through his bedroom window and brings him along on a quest of revenge against her cheating boyfriend and duplicitous friends. In the morning, she’s disappeared, but Quentin believes she’s left clues for him to come and find her. Bringing along his nerdy friends Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith) for the ride, Quentin sets off to find Margot and live life to the fullest because that’s what she wants him to do.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Paper Towns has a tricky line to walk. On the one hand, it fully embraces Margo’s approach towards life. It wants its teenage audience to be daring and imaginative and doesn’t expect them to cringe when Margo says lines like, “You have to get lost before you find yourself.” Margo should have an industrious life writing taglines for movies like Paper Towns because it wants to pawn these platitudes off as wisdom, but we get wrapped up in that romanticism because that’s Quentin’s point of view.

Schreier has crafted a bit of a sucker punch that can be achingly earnest but also surprisingly mature at its conclusion. The film is lovingly shot and wonderfully acted with a cast of actors who could all break out big with the exception of, ironically, Delevingne. Wolff’s moony-eyed performance helps sell us on Margo’s greatness, not Delevingne disaffected tone. Like the rest of the cast except for Halston Sage, who plays Margo’s friend Lacey, Delevingne is believable as a teenager, but never as the “miracle” Quentin sees her as.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

The further away the movie gets away from Margo the better it is since it grounds everything in the relationships and revelations of the characters. Wolff, Abrams, and Smith are fantastic together, and the moments they have together ring true. You can see these characters getting back together in 10 years and reminiscing about the events in this movie even if everything is drenched in a warm, fuzzy feeling. In these moments, I felt a connection to Paper Towns through my own experiences as opposed to when the movie is preaching about the importance of living life and treasuring memories.

But Paper Towns does have one lesson that all storytellers need to learn, and it comes with how it portrays Margo. It’s a bit odd for the movie to drop in a bit of literary criticism near the end of an uplifting journey that was initiated by the character who’s being critiquing, but it’s a welcome demythologization all the same. Schreier didn’t make an ode to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and while it’s not a hard-edged reckoning, it at least has the maturity that far too many stories fail to grasp.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

While Paper Towns isn’t the weepy experience of The Fault in Our Stars, it does attempt the same odd concoction of wish fulfillment and honesty, and in between the two it occasionally gets caught up in its contrived dialogue or treasure hunt. However, it ultimately finds something truthful in its journey that will speak to young audience members who will take comfort in Margo’s attitude but learn that she’s more than a totem.

Rating: B-

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