Paper Towns opens with a boy and a girl finding a dead man in a Florida subdivision, and never quite recovers from the fact that nothing else in the movie hits that hard. Jake Schreier directs from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, working off John Green’s 2008 novel. It runs 109 minutes. It is marketed as a mystery, drama and romance at once, and mostly settles for being a moody teen comedy that keeps losing its nerve.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Quentin Jacobsen and the Girl Across the Street
The setup is clean. Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, played by Nat Wolff, has loved Margo Roth Spiegelman from across the street in Jefferson Park, a subdivision of Orlando, since they were kids. Cara Delevingne plays Margo as a rumor with a face. She climbs through his window dressed like a ninja and recruits him for one night of revenge.
That night is the best stretch of the film. Margo has found out her boyfriend Jason “Jase” Worthington is sleeping with her friend Rebecca “Becca” Arrington. She and Quentin buy supplies and pull humiliating pranks on Jase, Becca and their friends, including Margo’s best friend Lacey Pemberton. Quentin gets to be brave for a few hours.
The Morning Margo Disappears
Then she vanishes. Quentin shows up at school and Margo is not there. Days pass. Some people treat her as missing. Others figure she just left. Her parents refuse to file a missing person report because she has run away before and they expect her back.
Quentin finds a freshly hung Woody Guthrie poster on her bedroom wall and decides the clues are meant for him. This is where Paper Towns makes its real bet: that a boy chasing a girl he barely knows is worth 109 minutes. It is not a bad bet. It is just a bet the movie keeps hedging.
Get Lost. Get Found.
Ben, Radar and the Friends He Ignores
The supporting cast is where the film keeps its footing. Austin Abrams plays Ben Starling and Justice Smith plays Marcus “Radar” Lincoln, Quentin’s fellow outcasts. Halston Sage is Lacey, Jaz Sinclair is Angela. These are the people Quentin actually has, and the movie knows it.
The problem is structural. Quentin’s search narrows his world to one absent person, and the film follows him there. Margo becomes a set of clues instead of a character. Delevingne is the film’s biggest draw, and the movie gives her far less to do than her presence deserves.
A Road Trip That Arrives Late
The back half turns into a drive toward an undisclosed location, with Ben and Radar along for the ride. It is here that Paper Towns finally says something. Quentin learns he has been in love with a version of Margo he built himself, and that the real one has been telling him so the whole time.
That is a sharper idea than the movie can carry. Neustadter and Weber wrote the screenplay, and you can feel them reaching for a romance that argues against its own romance. Paper Towns gets halfway there. It never commits to the ugliness of that idea, and it never lets Quentin be genuinely wrong.
What the Film Gets Right
The Florida setting is specific and lived-in. The high school feels like a real one. Wolff is likable in a role that mostly asks him to react, and Smith and Abrams give the movie its only real comic timing. Schreier keeps things moving.
What it does not have is a reason to exist beyond the book. The ending is tidy where the premise promised mess. The drama resolves, and then the credits roll, and you are left with a movie that was about something and could not say it plainly.
This is the part worth watching: the film’s central claim, that you cannot love a person you have only imagined, is correct and hard and true. Paper Towns flinches from it. It gives Quentin a confession instead of a reckoning, a hug instead of a loss. The result is a movie that is never bad and never brave.
It grossed over $85 million worldwide against a $12 million budget, a strong return on a modest production. It got mixed reviews, which tells you they did not get much back. Paper Towns is worth one watch for Delevingne and for the dead man in the opening scene, and not much after that.
5.6/10 (Metacritic 56/100).
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