Heading into tonight’s preview screening of Young Adult, I kept saying one thing - Jason Reitman never lets you down.  With 3 fantastic films under his belt, (Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air) he’s become a filmmaker to watch out for.  And with his latest holiday time release, Reitman doesn’t let you down - but he definitely puts you through the ringer for all 94 minutes of it.

Teaming up with Reitman once again is Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, and before the blogosphere starts making its jokes - this is not an “honest to blog” script. It’s not whip smart - it’s rough and tumble, much like the edges of it’s lead - Mavis Gray, played pitch perfectly by Charlize Theron.  Similar to Juno, this is a film about a woman in a state of flux - but instead of a young girl reaching out from the edges of high school and finding what the real world is, Theron’s Mavis is a woman twenty years removed from her high school years…and she can’t let go of it.

At age 37, Mavis is considered a big deal in her hometown in smalltown Minnesota.  She grew up, headed to “the Big City”, Minneapolis and started ghostwriting a Sweet Valley High-esq book series. She’s considered a big deal in her hometown, but in her own eyes? She’s meaningless.  The former pretty popular girl in high school made good in everyone’s eyes but her own, and she sits twenty years later, with a book series at its end, a marriage fallen apart and she’s just a drunken, glue sniffing mess.  She moves from partner to partner, sleeping with them and gaining nothing.  But she longs for what she once had - the love of a man named Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson).  She and Buddy were truly in love once, but something happened, and she never got it back.  After getting an email from Buddy’s wife, announcing the birth of their daughter, she becomes obsessed with the life she wanted, but never had - and decides she’s going to head home and get him back.

Clearly, these are not the actions of a sane mind, and the movie never once gives credence to it.  The film’s been called a comedy-drama, and it leans FAR FAR more on the latter.  Mavis hangs on to the ideas of what was, and what never would be again, because that’s what her happiness is built around.  Her work is built around creating worlds of high school drama, where every moment is so important  - or so it seems at the time, and she lets her real life fall apart, blinding herself with drink, drugs, bad love and hanging her heart on hopes that will never be met.  It’s a truly heartbreaking yet believable performance from Theron, and honestly, the Oscar talk deserves credence. Much as she did with Monster, she subverts her image here.  Before, she took her beauty to an ugly extreme - now, she takes her beauty and uses it to mask years of pain, hurt and self doubt.

Reitman shoots the film wonderfully - he’s at times been a very slick and smooth filmmaker, here, he shoots fast and loose - the shots are quickly composed, leaving you in the realties of the moment, and there are some brutal ones.  This is a film that pushes the pain of life forward.  Sure, it has its humorous edges, but at it’s core it’s about a very broken person.  Theron is well matched in the cast by an incredibly strong performance from Patton Oswalt.  As anyone who saw Big Fan knows, Oswalt can be fantastic and heartbreaking with the right material, and he nails it here.  Co-starring as Matt Freehauf, a man who went to high school with Mavis and suffered some (literal) scarring of his own, he hits the pain of the male geek - those who never got to escape the pain of those four years, and live with it every day.

Young Adult isn’t a film that is going to warm your heart this Christmas season by any means, but it’s one that you’ll be absolutely captivated by.  Diablo Cody aimed to subvert her writing for smart mouth teens past here, and she did it in spades, and Jason Reitman? He’s four for four, even if I don’t know how comfortable I’d be with watching this movie again.  The cringe factor is high here, gang, but so is the quality.  Check it out.

Young Adult gets a limited release on December 9th, with a full general release roll-out on December 16th.