Four out of Five stars
Running time: 94 mins

With its lack of zingers and a dour, measured approach, does Young Adult signal the end of a Diablo Cody I know and love?

There was a huge backlash to the enormous success of Juno, Diablo Cody's debut as screenwriter. Too many found Cody's dialogue unbearably cute and stylized. They cite the opening scene of Juno (between Ellen Page and Rainn Wilson) as hard to sit through because every line sounds like it came straight out of a snarky blog, but rather than forgive this as a rookie mistake, many have called her undeserving of the Oscar and all the success that followed.

I've never had a problem with her dialogue. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I love her work. With Young Adult, we see Diablo Cody lose her schtick. While this may win over Cody's detractors, it totally subverted my expectations and felt as though Cody had started listening to her own critics. I would argue that her TV show United States of Tara was a marker of her growth as a screenwriter while remaining true to her voice; you can have your cake and eat it too.

Upon a second viewing though, I could appreciate Young Adult for the good film that it is. In a phenomenal performance, Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a ghost-writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown in an attempt to reclaim her (now happily married) high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson), during her stay, she forms an unusual bond with a former classmate (Patton Oswalt) who is still struggling with the pain of his own high school experience.

The plot of Young Adult is like a conventional romantic comedy with a truly unlikable character at its centre, whom it never expects us to root for. This is refreshing for a film released in the same year as What's Your Number where Anna Faris pursued her love interest with the same level of insanity as Theron pursues hers, but Young Adult asks us, what if the romantic heroine was truly pathetic and screwed up? Without spoiling too much, it all builds to a scene where we are uncertain of who exactly is pity-screwing who, I've never seen that in a film before.

The film is worth seeing for Diablo Cody's writing, of course, but for Charlize Theron too. Her performance is subtle but an utterly convincing portrait of arrested adolescence. It was too confronting for Oscar, who didn't nominate Theron for another shot at Best Actress, but she's worthy of all the acclaim nonetheless. Her brutal delivery of the line "No, you're good here" in the film's final scene killed me. I don't suppose we will get a romantic heroine like Theron's anytime soon, and for that I'm grateful to Diablo Cody, who hasn't lost her edge.