The Wackness

The Wackness (2008), directed by Jonathan Levine, is a coming-of-age drama you can watch online on iFILM. New York, summer of 1994: Rudy Giuliani has just won the mayorship and is cleaning up the streets, which makes things harder for Luke Shapiro, a lonely high-school senior who sells weed from a food cart and is pretty sure the city is moving on without him.

Josh Peck plays Luke with a convincing kind of invisible sadness. His only real connection is Dr. Squires — a pill-popping psychiatrist who accepts pot in lieu of payment — played by Ben Kingsley in a mode nobody expected from him: genuinely funny, genuinely lost. The trade works, for a while, until Luke falls for the doctor's stepdaughter and things get messier than either of them planned.

The soundtrack is built from the hip-hop canon of that specific summer — Wu-Tang, Biggie, Nas — and it earns every track. This isn't a nostalgia exercise; it's a film that gets how crushing it is to be young, broke, and invisible in a city that doesn't notice you. Stream The Wackness (2008) online on iFILM.