Nostalgia often comes with the stinking residue of exploitation, thanks to its overuse in selling pleasure cruises, so it’s a rare film that’s able to shake off the negative connotations and use it as an effective storytelling device. Newcomer Jonathan Levine handles it with a master’s delicacy in The Wackness, his first feature-length as both writer and director. The film is set in New York in 1994, the summer Rudy Giuliani took over as mayor. It explicitly targets the children of the baby boomers (read: products of the ‘90s), and coats all of its reminiscences in the layer of irony that Generation Y can’t swallow anything without. Though Levine finds a careful balance between reminding us how silly it is to constantly use “mad” as a prefix to increase the strength of a statement and how much fun it was to do it, what elevates The Wackness above a familiar coming-of-age tale amidst a milieu of namedrops is the cleverness of its execution.

The story follows Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), a drug dealer and friendless virgin who pays his therapist (Ben Kingsley) in pot, and wanders the city with an ice cream cart labelled “del cious ices.” This is apparently so unconvincing as both a cover for a marijuana operation and as a legitimate ice cream cart that no one except his regular clients ever approach him. Though the fact that the police never stop Luke does draw into question Levine’s decision to set the story during one of the largest crime crackdowns in American history, it isn’t long before Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby) is introduced, and Luke’s profession takes a back seat to the romantic subplot. Thankfully, this is where The Wackness really starts to shine.

As Luke sits on a beach, watching the aloof Stephanie walk toward the breaking waves while drenched in soft, warm washes of orange light, he imagines all the different ways he can think of to tell her he loves her. Though the outcome of their relationship is predictable, the way that Levine plays the coming-of-age clichés against his likable characters and nostalgic esthetic makes it impossible not to see yourself or someone you know in one or both of the not-so-star-crossed lovers. While there is a superficial appeal to a film set against a soundtrack of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Biggie Smalls, Wu Tang and Biz Markee (the introduction of Method Man’s character during a Biggie and Method Man track is a particularly nice touch), the true appeal of the film lies with its timeless emotional weight.

After veering hard toward romance-land, Levine attempts to work in a motif where Luke occasionally lets it drop to Stephanie that he “hasn’t tried X-activity before,” and though it’s effective in a few places, it feels hammy toward the end. Still, it does little to derail the ultimate success of the romantic device. Rather than a film that will only appeal to those who remember their first Nike pumps and the golden age of East Coast hip hop, The Wackness is for anyone who remembers the first time they tried coffee, the first time they had a run-in with the law or the first time they spent a summer chasing a pretty girl.