Paper Towns is the latest film adapted from the novels of author John Green, whose teens-with-terminal-cancer romance The Fault in Our Stars provided the source for last summer’s critical and commercial hit of the same name. Directed by Robot & Frank helmer Jake Schreier, Paper Towns gently hits on a variety of familiar coming of age themes – unrequited love, impending adulthood, the end of an era feel of leaving school – but also explores the notion of treating someone as more of an idea than an actual person.
Q (Nat Wolff) has had a crush on his next door neighbour Margo (Cara Delevingne) for most of his life. The two used to be best friends but grew apart through high school when pretty, charismatic free-spirit Margo became the most popular girl in school while quiet, hard-working Q got his head down and waited for high school to end.
With only a couple of weeks left, Q gets an unexpected late-night visit from Margo who needs an accomplice for a series of mild crimes she plans to commit against the former friends who have done her wrong. Margo drags Q along on her revenge mission just as she did when they were kids and in the process drags him out of his comfort zone. He thinks this is the rekindling of their childhood friendship and maybe more until, the very next morning, Margo disappears.
In typical quirky Margo fashion, she leaves behind a series of clues – a Woody Guthrie album, highlighted passages in Leaves of Grass, notes wRitTen lIkE tHiS – that appear to be telling Q where to find her. Along with his best buddies – wannabe ladies’ man Ben (Austin Abrams) and sensible Radar (Justice Smith) – he sets out to crack Margo’s clues and track her down.
The interesting question at the heart of Paper Towns – something Q never bothers to ask himself – is what if Margo doesn’t want to be found? What if the clues aren’t for his benefit and what if this is nothing to do with him? The film largely goes along with Q’s assumption and for much of its run time treats Margo – who is missing for most of the film – as a manic pixie dream girl who only really exists to teach Ben a lesson about living life while ignoring – as Q does – that Margo is a person with her own thoughts, feelings and agenda.
All of that makes for an effective narrative, particularly once Q, Ben and Radar – joined by Margo’s friend Lacey (Halston Sage) and Radar’s girlfriend Angela (Jaz Sinclair) – go on a road trip to the paper town they believe Margo has run off to. But when it gets interesting is when it flips the script and reveals that Margo is actually her own person, acting for herself and is more – or less – than the mythical creature that Q and the rest of her classmates have built her up as, and Q has to face the fact that his dream girl is just a girl and none of this is about him.
While it’s an interesting idea, the way the film handles this is slightly problematic as it pretty much has its cake and eats it too, benefiting from the idea of Margo the myth and then preaching the pitfalls of building someone up so much in your mind. Nonetheless, it’s still a resonant theme and is played out with immense charm by both Wolff – who has all the qualities of a young John Cusack – and Delevingne, originally a model but proving to be a compelling and charismatic screen presence.
While Q is all about his quest to find Margo, his friends are along for the ride primarily as a way to spend time together, one last hurrah before they all go their separate ways for college. It’s an old teen movie trope and of course feels familiar but there’s enough sweetness in the boys’ relationship and a real poignancy in the realisation that things are never going to be the same for them again.
While Paper Towns perhaps doesn’t do enough with its central theme and ultimately feels slightly too familiar – even its synth soundtrack feels like a John Hughes throwback – its characters are likeable enough to spend time with and really root for.
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