A quintessential indie, Adult World is a satirical comedy about an eccentric and ambitious woman who, upon graduation from college, convinces herself that she’s going to be a very famous poet.
Emma Watson, in her second outing this season as a troubled youngster (the other being Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring) plays Amy Anderson, sort of a contempo would-be Sylvia Plath, who initially perceives poetry as a calling and a vocation.
Reality strikes when Amy, burdened with debts and unemployed, is forced to move back in with her folks, who force her to get a job. Desperate and flaunting a poetry degree that is not very worthy in the market place, she soon resolves to take the only job she can find, working in an adult book store called Adult World.
Desperate and still clinging to her aspiration to get her poems published, Amy stalks an aging punk poet figure named Rat Billings (John Cusack), who is one of the greatest poets of the 1990s. Rat reluctantly agrees to mentor her.
In time, Amy makes new friends with a colorful gallery of people, including the drag queen Rubia, the elderly couple who own Adult World, and most important of all, Alex, the charming and quirky young manager.
Is Amy heady toward a sobering realization that, after all, she might not be the voice of her generation?
