Coming of age in a luna park. An ambitious high-school grad has to earn college money to study journalism at Columbia, so he has to take a summer job at "Adventureland, Pittsburg PA", a brummagen (look it up) amusement park where he has to mix with the local dropouts and eventually (and inevitably) finds true love and the meaning of life! It's as cheesy as that, folks, but with a brilliant script (if not plot), direction and acting, I quickly gave in to the film's charm and consented to be lulled into a world where the anti-hero is nerdy, but in a really cool way, where attractive girls can be world-weary (in an attractive way), and where teenage angst is finally taken seriously. That's movie magic, I guess. The plot doesn't have to be plausible or realistic, and it can be clichéd from here to Hanoi, as long as the movie is good enough to make us want to believe it.
Which is what this movie does.
Which is what this movie does.