Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chemical Hearts’ on Amazon Prime, a YA Teen-Lit Romance Hot and Ripe for a Good Melancholy Wallow

Amazon original movie Chemical Hearts had me pondering whether a teen romance story (non-comedy) can exist without coming-of-age elements. Teenagers by their nature are in a state of transition, and then they become adults forever defined by the scars of their age-coming, which is absolutely one of the themes of the movie. It’s also a good explanation as to why the raw emotional evolution of adolescents makes YA literature — like this movie’s source material, Krystal Sutherland’s Our Chemical Hearts book — so extraordinarily popular. And this leads to the most important question at hand: How vulnerable are unwitting middle-aged men to the wiles of a weepie aimed at teens? The answer, as you’ll soon find out, may be embarrassing.

CHEMICAL HEARTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Henry Page (Austin Abrams) describes himself via voiceover: A good writer; wants to lead the school newspaper in this, his senior year; romantically inexperienced; nothing interesting or remarkable has ever happened to him. YOU JUST WAIT, I wanted to yell at the screen like an encouragement and a warning at the same time. He soon finds out that the young woman whose shoulder he just peered over while she was reading a Pablo Neruda love sonnet is going to be his co-editor-in-chief. She’s new in school. She’s also a good writer. She walks with a cane. She doesn’t say much. She’s Grace Town (Lili Reinhart of Riverdale fame), and she’s not unfriendly, but she’s a tough nut to crack, and does quirky things, e.g., when Henry misses the bus, she walks with him and when they get to her house she offers him a ride and then makes him drive her car and then gets out and leaves her car in front of his house and hobbles home with her cane.

They do this a bunch of times, which is love, of course, especially in the movies, and you’re grade-A moron to think otherwise.

Did I mention Grace loaned Henry the book of sonnets? He actually read the Neruda piece incisively, and she seems impressed when he shares some thoughtful observations of it. Maybe he passed a test, because she soon takes him to an abandoned factory where there’s a dingy pool of water full of colorful koi fish. It’s her secret place, where she comes to be even more sad than she seems to be in her everyday life, and wade in with the fish and feed them bread. She struggles to write these days, she says, so she only wants to edit the school paper. He stalks her a little on the internet, so when she eventually shares the secret of her depression and limp, he keeps to himself that he already knows. It’s a terrible tragedy. She’s traumatized. You would be too, but imagine being 17 and dealing with it.

Grace perks up a little in Henry’s company. He’s an awkward kid, but she seems to appreciate his earnestness and soulful streak. “I can’t find the words when I talk, and you can’t find the words when you write,” he says. Pressured months in advance to come up with a big, profound theme for the year-end paper, she has an idea: Teenage Limbo. It’s the state of coming-of-age every high-schooler goes through, that not-a-kid-but-not-an-adult transition that makes everything difficult — everything JUST LIKE THIS VERY SITUATION, I said to my living room. The guy’s hobby is Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, something that’s very SYMBOLISTICAL-like for this story. I mean, he’s never had a girlfriend and she’s raw hamburger emotionally and I could only hope Henry is smart enough to realize he can’t form and grill her patty for her. I think I just mixed my metaphor with the movie’s metaphor, but it doesn’t matter, because when are Henry and Grace gonna KISS and CRY and GET IT OVER WITH?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Let’s see, we’ve got Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Fault in Our Stars, except nobody is dying here, save for very slowly and eventually, in an existential-dread kind of way. It’s similar in tone to the sturdy indie The Spectacular Now or something like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s also not nearly as good as Lady Bird or The Edge of Seventeen, possibly because those two movies aren’t beholden to YA novels.

Memorable Dialogue: “When I look at that, it reminds me that people are just the ashes of dead stars. We’re just a collection of atoms that come together for a brief period of time, and then we fall apart,” Grace says while looking up at the stars, proving she’s a walking Werner Herzog documentary voiceover narrative.

Sex and Skin: Some people will relish the YEARNFUL suspense as to what exactly will happen between Grace and Henry, because the sexual tension hurts so good. I’m not here to spoil anything, but I can confirm there’s some of the former and not really any of the latter and leave it at that.

Our Take: Chemical Hearts is from a subgenre I like to call Melancholy Indie Rock Romance, which is usually the stuff of teen love stories, or at least young-people-in-love stories, but not exclusively. The same wistful minor-key floating-dream Beach House track plays in this movie enough times to embed itself firmly in your hippocampus, and I get it, because for me, it was all the downtempo Pearl Jam tracks making me feel worse when I felt bad when I was 17.

Large swaths of Chemical Hearts work, because the screenplay gets out of its own way and allows Grace and Henry to be confused teens muddling through the yin and yang of their singular and collective situations. Reinhart and Abrams are strong in their roles, and we’ll remember their chemistry and charisma over the handful of dumb things the screenplay asks them to do or say. It tries a little too hard to integrate the wisdom of Henry’s sister Sadie (Sarah Jones) into the story — she’s a neurologist on the sore end of a breakup, and therefore has all kinds of pseudo-profound things to say about the chemical nature of elation and heartbreak and grief. Maybe you’ll, like, learn something, maybe.

The movie can be a little cringey at times; a few portions felt overcooked; Richard Tanne’s direction leans less towards art and more towards trying too hard to be art; the whole endeavor tends to be a melodramatic wallow in maudlin soups of the teenage emotional experience. Yet it touches on some core truths about trauma and its effect on human relationships, and bakes in the idea that adults tend to be scarred and damaged people who made it through their stupidly difficult teenage years. That’s why it’s hard for a fortysomething dude to harden up in the presence of two mostly pragmatic characters hitting and missing with each other, which makes middle-aged types wish they knew then what they know now, and all that hackneyed-but-true crap. I cried a tear or three, apparently susceptible to the manipulations of YA fodder. So be it. But maybe it’s evidence the movie is a little bit more than just that.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Chemical Hearts is a moody drama, for better or worse, and a reasonably engrossing dramatic excursion into the lugubriousness of teenage love.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Chemical Hearts on Amazon Prime