A friend once told me that his gold standard for new acquaintances involved the Leonard Cohen song “Anthem.” “There is a crack, a crack in everything,” the song goes. “That’s how the light gets in.” He applied it as a kind of authenticity test, because — pace Mr. Cohen — there are people out there who appear to lack the crack, whether it never fully formed or has been willfully spackled shut. There are films that lack it, too, some more ironically than others. Watching The Art of Getting By , the story of a singular teenager told in oppressively uniform terms, I was reminded of my friend’s judgment of a man I was seeing: No crack, no sir.
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REVIEW: The Art of Getting By Barely Masters the Art of Perfunctory Teen Romance
