Paper Towns

Another summer, another love story adapted from a John Green YA novel. ‘Paper Towns’ adds a pinch of existential adventure to the seize-the-day message of last year’s ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. Nat Wolff is Quentin, a high school senior with the hots for Margo (Cara Delevingne), the mysterious popular girl who lives across the street.

One night, a few weeks shy of graduation, Margo slips through Quentin’s bedroom window. She’s about to embark on a mischievous revenge spree, and she needs a getaway driver. Cue a series of moonlit shenanigans that ends with her lecturing Quentin about the smallness of suburban life, only then for her to vanish the next morning. From there, ‘Paper Towns’ is basically ‘Gone Girl’ as John Hughes might have written it.

Quentin discovers that Margo has left a trail of breadcrumbs as to her whereabouts, and he enlists his two best friends (and Margo’s jilted BFF) to help him solve the case. As Quentin grows increasingly obsessed with finding Margo, it starts to become clear that she’ll never live up to the idea of her he has in his head – in part because no girl ever could, but also because she might be full of shit.

Delevingne is the perfect choice to play a manic pixie dream girl, her performance expertly treading the line between spirited and self-righteous. What a shame then the movie around her fails to strike a similar balance.