The First Look at 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'

The first trailer for the movie adaptation of Stephen Chbosky's popular 1999 young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower premiered during the MTV Movie Awards last night, and it's not exactly a teen dream.

The first trailer for the movie adaptation of Stephen Chbosky's popular 1999 young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower premiered during the MTV Movie Awards last night, and it's not exactly a teen dream.

What made the novel, made up of letters sent by a shy high school freshman named Charlie to an unnamed recipient, so affecting was its quiet thoughtfulness and lived-in, real-world sensibility. It's not a book about crazy kids doing crazy things, it's mostly regular kids, albeit sad ones, doing normal-ish kid stuff. Obviously a movie trailer is going to sexy everything up to pique interest, but something about this trailer — maybe it's how movie star good-looking everyone is, maybe it's the heavy-handed inspirational music — makes us apprehensive. But, we should of course keep in mind that Chbosky wrote and directed this thing himself, so if it's good enough for him, it should probably be good enough for us. (Though, uh, he also wrote the screenplay for the Rent movie, so screenwriting might not be his forte.)

Anyway, this could be the movie that makes Logan Lerman a star, which has seemed destined to happen for a couple years now. And it's another opportunity for Kevin himself (when are we going to talk about him?), Ezra Miller, to act wild. And, perhaps most interestingly, we get to hear Emma Watson's American accent! Not bad, right? Maybe all these beautiful wallflowers will be all right after all.