The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the 22-year-old actress – whose upcoming film credits include Tulip Fever, London Fields, Kids in Love, Pan and Suicide Squad – to chat about her audition, meeting John Green for the first time and the stars she admires most in the industry. It may not quite reach the heights of films like ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL or THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, yet it is easy to go along for the ride. Wolff brings more personality and substance to Quentin, but he has more chemistry with his buddies than with Margo. Margo Roth Spiegelman was something special, and the two young neighbors quickly became best friends. No one is particularly anxious – she’s done this sort of thing before – but Quentin, deeply in love in that tormented-teenager way, is convinced she wants him to find her.
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We’ve seen the elements that make up “Paper Towns” before, but that’s OK.
Nat Wolff is Q, a strait-laced kid readying for college, a medical degree and kids before he’s 30. He is able to give the lovelorn young romantic heart without succumbing to what could have been forced sentimentality.
What doesn’t: Behind all the smoke and mirrors, there’s really not a lot to the female character around which the film revolves. Not only does the audience understand why everybody falls for Margo, even though she’s frustratingly flighty, but Delevingne has such an unmistakable magnetism, you miss the supermodel newcomer when she’s not around for half the movie.
The film contains mentions of sexual activity, teenage sexual banter, fleeting rear male nudity, and fleeting crude language and profanities.
By the time everyone, including Margo’s stunning friend Lacey Pemberton (Halston Sage), hops into a Honda Odyssey to track down Margo in a “paper town” in New York State (I thought paper towns did not exist, but never mind), I was done with “Paper Towns“. In fact, one complaint is that the eventual road trip ends far too quickly. While “TFIOS” was remarkably true to the book, director Jake Schreier (“Robot & Frank”) and writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Like the last one, “The Fault in Our Stars“, this one is a collection of pretty moments and yearning pop songs rather than a fully convincing story. Occasionally the dialogue runs the risk of sounding a bit silly, but somehow it all works. After Margo has visited sufficient humiliation and discomfort on her ex, she and Q end up in a high-rise looking down on Orlando at night, which puts her in a philosophical mood: it’s “a paper town with paper people”, she observes. This coming-of-age tale seems impossibly romanticized, yet somehow it still manages to remain grounded and truthful.
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All gawk and nerdy charm, Wolff effectively captures Quentin’s universality as a boy so into a girl he’s bound to do anything, even go searching for a “paper town”, a fake town placed on a map to prevent copyright infringement.
