'Paper Towns': Romantic teens trying to catch on

Paper Towns, a road-trip teen romance and scavenger-hunt of a movie adapted from John Green's YA novel of the same name, invokes the restless spirits of Woody Guthrie and Walt Whitman. The famous photo of the itinerant folkie wielding his "This machine kills fascists" guitar hangs in a window. A collection of Whitman's verse sits by a bed, its pages rife with highlighted lines.

But the thing that really gets the film's three best buddies worked up in any significant way is the Pokémon theme song. Q (Nat Wolff), Ben (Austin Abrams), and Radar (Justice Smith), seniors at a suburban high school in Florida, come to life as they wail the chorus in celebration of the chomping Japanese critters.

Real passion, or what passes for it, is reserved for the vintage TV cartoon based on an arcade game. The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars, a teen cancer-patient tale made into a tear-jerking hit. This one isn't a tearjerker - and isn't likely to be a hit, either.

Paper Towns is all about Q (short for Quentin) and his lifelong obsession with the girl next door, Margo Roth Spiegelman - played by British model Cara Delevingne. When they were kids (cue flashbacks), they were best friends, but as adolescence hit, they drifted apart. Margo turned beautiful and wild, with Q, an A student who plays things safe, watching longingly as she floats by.

But one night, Margo climbs through Q's window, as she used to when she was little. She talks him into driving her around town on a mission of revenge - her boyfriend has cheated on her. Spray paint and Saran Wrap are required. Q takes a gulp or two for courage and agrees to tag along.

The next day, Q is back at school, still pumped by his adventure and the close proximity to his muse. But Margo doesn't show up in homeroom. And she doesn't return the next day, or the next. She has disappeared.

The second half of Paper Towns then follows Q, in the company of Ben and Radar - later joined by Radar's girlfriend, Angela (Jaz Sinclair), and Lacey (Halston Sage), who Ben wishes was his - as they try to solve the mystery of Margo.

What happened to her? And what about all these clues she's left behind? A 1984 road atlas. Graffiti in an abandoned building in "the Detroit-ist part of Orlando." And what is a "paper town" anyway? Why, it's a fictitious entry on a map - as well as a metaphor for the flat, plain places people live in and their flat, plain lives.

About 1,200 miles and 26 hours later, the soon-to-be graduates of Jefferson Park High are wheeling Q's mom's minivan around upstate New York in search of . . . well, Margo, obviously. But they're also in search of a meaningful ending to this tale, the moral of which has something to do with the danger of mythologizing people, putting them on a pedestal. Even beautiful models from England have their flaws.

Discuss over milkshakes at diner.

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