Turtles All the Way Down

The latest screen adaptation from Indianapolis' own John Green is a gripping look at teen mental health struggles, though the romance portion is severely imbalanced.

“Turtles All the Way Down” is as gripping and authentic a portrait of teen mental health struggles as we’ve seen.

No surprise there, in that it’s based on the book by Indianapolis’ own John Green, who specializes in novels that approach young people at eye level, without condescension or simplification. His work embraces youths in all their messy contradiction rather than reflexively judging them.

Previous screen adaptations of his work include “The Fault in Our Stars,” a critical and commercial hit, and “Paper Towns,” considerably less popular but solid in my book. “Turtles,” which is being released on the Max streaming platform May 2, is a step or two down from the other films, but still worthy of recommendation.

And it’s the rare feature film explicitly set in Indianapolis, with plenty of references to the city’s history, hidden charms, obvious failings and profound Midwestern-ness. You’ll see many shots of indigenous locales including the White River, Pogue’s Run and a view of the Indy skyline from atop IU Health downtown hospital. The school the kids go to sharply resembles Arsenal Tech.

(Alas, all faked or CGI’d to look like the real thing, as the movie was shot in Ohio.)

It’s the story of Aza Holmes, a 17-year-old — I think every John Green protagonist is 17 — who’s smart and good-natured but suffers from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. She’s transfixed by germs and microbes, constantly re-opening/re-bandaging a finger callus and slathering sanitizer, to the point she sees herself as a “glorified bacterial colony” who isn’t in charge of her own mind.

She often doesn’t even feel like a real person.

This is a tremendous performance by Isabela Merced as Aza: troubled, vulnerable, a bit self-wallowing but with a genuinely good heart and a desire to move beyond her diagnosis. She dreams of going to Northwestern University to study philosophy under professor Lucia Abbott (J. Smith-Cameron), but feels hampered and hectored by her protective single mom, Gina (Judy Reyes), after the death of her father when Aza was a preteen.

Her best friend is the very much Daisy Ramirez (Cree Cicchino), the most extro of extroverts, who’s always pushing Aza to try new things and get outside her thought spirals. They cruise about in Aza’s car, Harold the Toyota, bequeathed from her father and obsessed over almost as much as her germ fixation. They chow habitually at Applebee’s — always with a coupon, because they’re not heiresses, Daisy pronounces.

The relationships between Aza and Daisy, between Aza and her mother, and to a lesser extent her and her therapist (Poorna Jagannathan), are really enough to fuel the vehicle of Aza’s journey. Early on Mychal (Maliq Johnson), the third of Aza’s little friend group, professes his adoration for Daisy and the two slide themselves off to the side for a little canoodling, leaving Aza untethered to collapse into herself.

But movies of this sort tend to tack on a romance to provide narrative momentum and a hook for audiences, and unfortunately in this case the tacking-on seems especially superfluous.

Unlike “Fault” and “Towns,” where we couldn’t imagine the main character’s tale without their romantic opposite — requited or not — in “Turtle” the boyfriend character is so severely unbalanced with Aza that he feels much more like a storytelling construct than a relatable person.

Felix Mallard plays Davis Pickett, the eldest son of a billionaire engineering mogul. He and Aza had a friendship when they attended the same camp years before for kids who lost a parent. As the story opens, Davis’ father has suddenly disappeared under a cloud of suspicion, and a $100,000 reward is being offered for clues to his whereabouts.

Daisy convinces Aza to initiate a half-assed Nancy Drew investigation, not only to split the cash to fund their college ambitions, but also because Davis is gorgeous as all get out and Daisy believes they could be a potential couple.

“Why can't you have that super-observant kind of OCD that makes you an amazing detective like all those crime shows my dad watches?” Daisy complains to Aza.

I liked how the movie quickly dispenses with the clichéd portion of this plan — I’ll leave you to discover the particulars — and dives into the coupling.

These being 2024 teens, their courtship takes place mostly via text messages and a few awkward ‘hangs’ because the kids don’t like to call them dates anymore. Of course, when your new beau is a billionaire’s kid with his own private jet at his beck and call, their adventures tend to be more far-flung.

“Turtles” was directed by Hannah Marks (“Don’t Make Me Go”), who elicits consistently compelling performances from her young leads. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber ably handled the screenplay adaptations of Green’s first two features, but here the duties are turned over to Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, who previously partnered on “Love, Simon,” another standout flick about a troubled teen.

(Green himself has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as a volleyball coach.)

Mallard does what he can with his screen time, but as written there just really isn’t much of a character there. Davis is more a girlhood fantasy of the ideal boyfriend: impossibly handsome, charming, kind, funny, spectacularly rich but not stuck up about it, and utterly subservient to the whims and needs of Ava.

Davis exists to be desired, not to have a life of his own.

The friendship with Daisy takes an unexpected turn about two-thirds of the way through the movie, and I couldn’t help thinking how watching them navigate this newfound dynamic is so much more interesting than anything that happens between Aza and Davis. He’s a dreamy distraction.

The film finds its footing in the last go, as Aza sinks to her lowest and finally starts undertaking the laborious steps necessary for true, meaningful change. The important people in her life are going to be along for the ride, but she understands she has to take the wheel herself.

“No one ever says goodbye unless they want to see you again,” someone says a couple of times in the movie, and “Turtles All the Way Down” is a lovely reminder that sometimes you have to let go in order to move on.