Stephen Chbosky makes films about teenagers who are hurting and means every frame of them. That sincerity is his strength and his limit: he trusts his young actors completely, then adds a line to explain what their faces have already told us.
Fi1m perspective
Near the start of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), Logan Lerman's Charlie writes a letter to a stranger and reads it to us in a soft, careful voice. It tells us he is lonely. His face has already told us. That is Chbosky's habit in one scene: he casts well, gives the actors room, and then does not quite believe they have done the job.
He came to directing late and sideways. He published the novel in 1999, wrote the screenplay for Rent (2005), created the television series Jericho (2006–08), and only then made his first feature, adapting his own book. Since then he has directed Wonder (2017), Dear Evan Hansen (2021) and Nonnas (2025), and shared the screenplay credit on Beauty and the Beast (2017), which reunited him with Emma Watson. The subject hardly moves: adolescents, damage, friendship, and how much of it can be said aloud.
Perks is the film to judge him by, and it is a decent one. It is sincere and kind to everyone in it. Paul Rudd's teacher says almost nothing and it is the right amount; Kate Walsh and Dylan McDermott play parents who are good people and do not see what is in front of them. It moved us more than a film this untidy should have, and the reason was Ezra Miller, whose Patrick makes worth an evening a film that would otherwise be for the interested.
The untidiness is the problem, and it comes from the writer, not the director. Chbosky adapted himself, an arrangement that usually means nobody could tell him no, and he kept nearly everything: a dead aunt, a dead friend, a sister (Nina Dobrev) with a boyfriend who hits her, a first kiss, a first drug, a secret romance, all in 103 minutes. The letters keep stepping in to tell us what we have just watched. When the hardest material arrives, late, Mary Jo Markey cuts it as though the film has a train to catch, and we felt hurried at exactly the moment we should have been allowed to sit still. The reviews of Dear Evan Hansen faulted it for keeping faith with a flawed source, and some found Wonder soft on its subject; we have not reviewed either, but the first charge is one we recognise.
John Hughes made this film several times in the 1980s with the sadness taken out. Chbosky put the sadness back and lost some of the jokes doing so. Start with Perks. If the letters do not bother you, nothing else of his will.
Biography
Stephen Chbosky is an American screenwriter, film director and author. He was born on 25 January 1970 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.F.A. in film writing in 1992 and directed his first feature, The Four Corners of Nowhere, in 1995.
Chbosky wrote the 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. He wrote the screenplay and directed the 2012 film adaptation. His other screenwriting credits include Rent (2005) and the screenplay for Beauty and the Beast (2017). He co-created the television series Jericho (2006–2008) and directed the films Wonder (2017) and Dear Evan Hansen (2021). His second novel, Imaginary Friend, was published in 2019.
