Long ago, when I was a middle class suburban teen, I had the dubious experience of spending most of a year around rich kids. A few of them were as rich as the family depicted in this film. This movie, more than any other I've seen, nails the behavior of young super-wealthy kids like the characters portrayed by Chris Pine and Kristin Stewart. That intoxicating mix of being beautiful, athletic, active, charming, seductive, cocky, arrogant, witty, disarming, entitled, and in their souls, corrupted and corrupting, envious, narcissistic, self-absorbed, irrationally competitive, and pitiful. Of course this film depiction is exaggerated (but not incorrect) in its evil and violence, but it hits far more realistic notes than false ones. Uncannily so. This really is what young foks act like when they know there will be no negative consequences to them acting out their whims.

Otherwise, this movie has something too many movies lack these days -- a smart story that's still engaging, seductive, funny, but still with a social message, that doesn't weigh you down with angst or excessive downerism, and that's well directed and acted, and easy to re-watch a few months later. Then a few months after that.

It's 1980. 16 year old Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin) wants to escape from his drug addicted "massage therapist" mother Liz (Diane Lane) and their lower east side flat to study the Iskanani Indians or Fierce People with his anthropologist father whom he has never met. Instead, she takes them to the New Jersey country estate of her ex-client billionaire Ogden C. Osbourne (Donald Sutherland) for the summer. There he encounters another kind of Fierce People. He falls for Ogden's granddaughter Maya Langley (Kristen Stewart) and befriends her older brother Bryce (Chris Evans). Their father is in a coma and their mother (Elizabeth Perkins) is bossy. Jilly (Paz de la Huerta) is the exceedingly friendly maid.

Anton Yelchin plays yet another smug kid. This time, he's studying rich people like an anthropologist. It's an overly odd family but the quirkiness never gets to be funny. Then the movie takes a dark turn. The characters and the story always had some dark tones but the turn is especially nasty. The quirky slightly humorous movie breaks down and struggles. The movie is terribly uneven and director Griffin Dunne should have started the movie in a darker place. If he elevates the darker tones early, the movie could stay creepy and disturbed.