Every decade gets its turn to be reheated in the Easy-Bake Oven of artistic memory, and with the arrival of Jonathan Levine's "The Wackness," the moment of 1990s nostalgia is officially here. This may be disorienting to those of us who were already adults in the '90s, but then the disbelieving reactions of older generations are part of the same process. Whether you graduated from high school in 1938 or just last month, the year in question will always loom large in your consciousness, most likely as the exquisitely poignant passageway from one life to another, redolent with the memory of that girl or boy who got away.

"The Wackness" revisits the sweltering New York summer of 1994 in loving detail. From a teenager's point of view, '94 was the year when the Notorious B.I.G. burst onto the airwaves and the year when Kurt Cobain put a shotgun to his head. It was also the year when New York's new mayor began to put his stamp on the city, and recent high-school graduate Luke Shapiro (played by former Nickelodeon teen star Josh Peck) may be more interested in Rudy Giuliani's anti-crime crackdown than your average teen. Luke is a shy, awkward kid, a near-friendless virgin who affects a hip-hop street demeanor and yearns to glimpse girls' panties on the subway. He's also moving fabulous amounts of gnarly Jamaican weed out of an Italian shaved-ice handcart.

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