By Bethany Bruno

There is a specific archetype of the millennial poet, a figure of earnest conviction we recognize instantly. She is armed with a liberal arts degree, student debt, and the belief that her interior life is a subject of profound importance. She was taught in workshops that her voice matters, and she took it to heart.

This is Amy (Emma Roberts), the heroine of Scott Coffey’s 2013 comedy Adult World, and the film suggests not that poetry is foolish, but that Amy’s fantasy of herself as a poet is incomplete. It challenges the idea that art is born fully formed from feeling alone and suggests, instead, that a voice is shaped through contact with other people, disappointment, work, and the humiliations of ordinary life.

Amy’s conviction is almost tender in its excess. She doesn’t simply write. She insists she is “writing nonstop, all the time,” that “things are pouring out of me you wouldn’t even believe.” She tells her father, with the panic of someone who can’t separate inspiration from destiny, “I mean, I’m feeling a lot. I’m thinking a lot. I’m inspired, Dad. I’m inspired!”

I first watched the movie a few years after my own college graduation, and Amy’s predicament felt less like fiction and more like my life. I was a wannabe writer drowning in debt, working a dead-end retail job, hoarding spare dollars not for savings, but for submission fees. That gap between what you long to be and what you can afford to be is the part of becoming a writer no workshop teaches.

Many films about poetry indulge in sentimentality, giving us teachers who stand on desks and command us to seize the day. Here, the mentor figure is Rat Billings. Played with exhausted grandeur by John Cusack, Billings is Amy’s literary hero, a once-celebrated poet now living in grimy seclusion, who wants almost nothing to do with her.

Cusack’s casting does sly work. For decades, he specialized in male yearning: the soulful talker, the boy who believes his feelings are a form of art. You can’t watch him without remembering the boombox in Say Anything, a grand gesture that now reads as sweet and also embarrassing. Rat is what happens when that boy grows older and keeps the pose but loses the softness.

When Amy keeps pressing Rat to read her poems, he tells her, “You’d be the type of muse I’d get.” Whatever Amy hopes he will become for her—wise teacher, literary father, gatekeeper to the life she wants—the film mostly refuses to let him fill that role. From the start, he treats her less as an aspiring poet than as an annoyance, or worse, a projection of his own stale literary ego.

Rat is less a hidden sage than a petty tyrant of literary taste, a man whose authority depends on keeping younger writers off-balance. His dismissiveness comes laced with irritation at Amy’s youth and pleasure in correction. When he asks, “How do you feel about failure?” and Amy answers, “I failed many times,” he replies, “That’s good. Continue to fail. If you want to make art, you have to fail. And so, the hardest job is to fail better.” It’s one of the few moments when he sounds almost like a real teacher, though the film never lets us forget how much of his authority rests on cruelty.

The most brutal moment makes that power explicit. Rat includes one of Amy’s poems in an anthology titled Shit Poetry: An Anthology of Bad Verse. In one gesture, he grants her publication and degrades her work, turning what she hoped would be recognition into ridicule. When Amy confronts him and destroys his guitar, he delivers another of his very few lines that sounds almost like instruction: “If everything is great, nothing would be special.” Even here, whatever lesson he offers comes wrapped in cruelty.

If Rat gives Amy anything of value, it comes late and in spite of himself. His final advice is: “You don’t suck. You don’t anything yet . . . Go out and live your life and get your heart broken.” This lands because it’s he has stopped performing his own bitterness. The line isn’t a full philosophy of art, but it may be the clearest statement the film gives us about Amy’s real lack: not talent, exactly, but experience.

The other education happens behind the counter of a sex shop where Amy works. She wants to write about the ethereal abyss, but she spends her days stocking shelves with objects of graphic, tangible reality. Her subjects become the human faces on the other side of the counter, including an elderly couple timidly seeking to rekindle a spark, and most especially Alex (Evan Peters), the coworker who becomes her first real friend. These are ordinary people.

By interacting with them, Amy stumbles toward William Carlos Williams’ dictum: “No ideas but in things.” She begins to ground her art not only in what she feels, but in what she sees.

Even so, the story complicates what “things” means in a place built around bodies, gender, and performance. The shop isn’t a punchline or a corrective for pretension. It is a workplace shaped by desire and shame, and by the people who have learned to survive both. Amy’s education doesn’t come only from Rat and his literary authority. It comes from the people behind the counter, from coworkers who built adulthood out of necessity rather than aesthetics.

That invites a question worth asking: Is it troubling that Amy’s poetic growth is routed through a sex shop and a failed male idol, as if her inner life needs correction from outside?

Coffey’s film is smarter than the easy critique. It doesn’t “fix” Amy by sexualizing her. It forces her to encounter other people’s vulnerability, loneliness, embarrassment, longing, and tenderness, and to see that those realities don’t exist in poems alone. The shop becomes a classroom because shame walks in every day and still pays for what it wants. Amy learns that “adult” doesn’t mean cynical. It means honest.

And Rat isn’t her only teacher. Rubia (Armando Riesco), the store manager, may understand the lesson better than he does. When she quotes Dickinson—“‘Forever is composed of nows.’ Emily Dickinson, bitch”—the line lands as both joke and wisdom. It helps pull Amy out of abstraction and back into the present tense of her own life, the life she has to actually inhabit if she wants to make anything of it. If Rat represents the stale authority of literary prestige, Rubia offers something more useful: a way of being alive in the moment with out apology. The film suggests that this lesson, more than Rat’s cruelty, helps Amy return to work after she’s become disillusioned with the job; allows her to reconnect with Alex after a falling-out; and and inspires her to move forward with her writing.

Still, there is an uneasy gender logic at work. Amy’s lyrical tendencies get treated as immaturity, while Rat’s bitterness reads as experience. The story risks implying that a young woman’s interiority is frivolous until a man or a job corrects it. That tension is part of what makes this movie worth engaging with. It critiques Amy’s self involvement and also asks us to notice how easily a young woman’s ambition gets mocked as childish, how quickly earnestness becomes a punchline in spaces governed by male taste.

What makes Adult World more interesting than a standard coming-of-age tale is that it never gives us a triumphant final proof that Amy has become a great poet. We don’t get the neat movie version of artistic arrival. Instead, after she sleeps with Alex, Amy gets a call that Le Passion—an erotica magazine he had suggested she submit her work to. They’re publishing her and paying her five hundred dollars.

The moment matters not because the film suddenly proves Amy has become a great poet, but because it suggests she has begun to move beyond Rat’s approval as the measure of whether her art matters. That restraint elevates the movie. Amy’s growth is visible less in her product than in her relation to the world around her. She begins, however fitfully, to occupy her own life instead of narrating herself from above.

And here is where I want to be a little agnostic about Williams. “No ideas but in things” is an excellent corrective to Amy’s early posture, but the movie doesn’t endorse a rejection of ideas or feelings. If it did, it would be telling her to become someone else. Instead, it suggests a subtler maturation: the inner life stays, but it stops being the only subject. The “things” don’t replace the ideas. They carry them. Williams is there, but so is Dickinson, with her insistence that “Forever is composed of nows.”

The film’s vision of art isn’t lofty or solemn. It is chatty, embarrassing, crude, immediate. It lives in Alex’s sketches of Amy, in a warehouse party’s Warhol drag, in Rubia’s profane wisdom, in the awkwardness of work and sex and failed ambition. The film suggests that art comes not from grand declarations of giftedness, but from learning how to inhabit a moment before trying to turn it into meaning.

The special joy of Adult World also lies in its realism about the creative process. It rejects the notion that poets are born from divine inspiration and suggests they’re forged in humility, embarrassment, work, bad jobs, misreadings, and failed idols. For a generation taught to look inward, it offers advice that doesn’t require you to seek out suffering, only to notice what life places in front of you: the surprising conversation, the eccentric person, the shift you work because rent is due, the place you once swore you were too good for.

Life will hand you material whether you want it or not, and paying attention, especially when your ego is bruised, becomes its own apprenticeship. Amy doesn’t become less herself. She becomes less alone in her own head.

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Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author whose fiction and nonfiction often explore history, place, and the strange beauty of Florida. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. She won Lunch Ticket’s Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, and the Tennessee Williams Short Story Contest. She was also a finalist for CutBank’s Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction and a Best of the Net nominee. Learn more at bethanybrunowriter.com.