MOVIE REVIEW : HOLLAND’S ‘SUMMER’ IS ANYTHING BUT DEAD

Savage Steve Holland’s “One Crazy Summer” (citywide) is a zesty hot-weather tonic, light and sparkling, and a fine follow-up to last fall’s “Better Off Dead,” Holland’s knockout debut feature. As impossible as it seems just now, Holland actually finds fresh approaches to the youth comedy.

Once again John Cusack, that dark, slim, young Everyman, stars. This time he’s Hoops McCann of Generic, N.Y., an aspiring animator and graduating high school basketball player who’s failed to land an athletic scholarship and is off to Nantucket for the summer to ponder his options. To be sure, there’s plenty of fun and games to divert him from such serious thoughts.

As in “Better Off Dead” (in which Cusack suffered the throes of a first broken romance), Holland proves to be a freewheeling comic spirit with a sure sense of rhythmic pacing and a healthy respect for such classic underpinnings as the struggle of the poor and nerdy against the rich and greedy. Once Holland has established plot, he can take off whenever and wherever his highly eclectic and ever-busy imagination takes him. Holland-plus-Cusack adds up to the Harold Lloyd of the ‘80s.

Demi Moore is Holland’s stunning damsel in distress, a struggling rock singer who’s got a week to raise $2,000 to keep her grandfather’s old place, a haven for the destitute, from being foreclosed by a ruthless developer (Mark Metcalf) whose son (Matt Mulhern) is a handsome, blond, bullying athlete, the kind of jerk born to try to make life miserable for nice guys like Hoop and his pals.

And what pals Hoop has! One of them is played by Bobcat Goldthwait, that goof’s goof who can turn sheer stupidity into a nonstop laughing matter, thanks to a dose of sweetness. Turn Goldthwait loose in a Godzilla suit and you’ve got a laff riot.

Holland is skilled with throwaway stuff--e.g., a pair of paramedics who chronically bicker over seniority in administering CPR. And he’s equally deft in interweaving Hoops’ cartoon fantasies into the story and in sustaining a whole series of running gags, one of which involves a weirded-out radio contest junkie (Bruce Wagner) who meets an excruciating fate.

What makes Holland special, and a talent to bear watching, is that all of his bits and pieces add up to a remarkably compassionate vision of the seemingly conventional American experience as being riddled with self-absorbed eccentrics both good and evil. It’s as if Holland could see the madness that lurks beneath the surface of everyday existence and decided in desperation to turn this perception into a joke.

“One Crazy Summer” is rated PG.