In “Remember Me,” Robert Pattinson, the producer and leading man, displays genuine acting chops as a “Rent”-related cousin of the “Rebel Without a Cause.” He’s Tyler Hawkins, a Strand bookstore worker, sometime New York University student and poetic misfit in the Jack Kerouac-J.D. Salinger mold.

Tyler, who writes and is told he reeks of “Listerine and beer,” lives a la boheme in New York City in 2001 in a hovel with a broken lock with the fast-talking, hard-drinking, fellow Strand employee and NYU student Aidan Hall (Tate Ellington).

Aidan talks about sex incessantly, while Tyler, who smokes with notably Byronic languor, has the one-night stands.When he isn’t stacking books, Tyler, who is about to turn 22, is at angry odds with his hot-tempered and bossy Master of the Universe father Charles (Pierce Brosnan), trying to help his 11-year-old sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins of “Shutter Island”) survive the battering of mean girls at school or brooding about his older brother, who committed suicide six years earlier at the age of, you guessed it, 22.

When Tyler and Aidan get into a street fight with some thugs, and Tyler physically challenges jaded NYPD cop Sgt. Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), Tyler and Aidan are arrested.

A short time later, Aidan notices that the cop’s daughter Allie (dewy-eyed Australian Emilie de Ravin of “Lost”) is a fellow NYU student and encourages the handsome Tyler to chat her up. Can you say Romeo and Juliet: 2001 style?

Did I mention that Swedish actress Lena Olin plays Pattinson’s mother? Aside from trying to take in cast members’ attempts to sound like they’re from New York (Olin wisely doesn’t bother), I found myself fairly engrossed by the story’s characters. Pattinson brings that enormous sculptural head of his to every scene, of course, and it’s a huge asset.

One shot of him in profile evokes any number of idealized images of troubled youth throughout art history.

Cooper and Brosnan are excellent as the different-but-also-the-same father figures. De Ravin looks amazingly like Martha Plimpton, who plays her mother in an opening flashback. But I wish she and Pattinson had more chemistry. Jerins and Pattinson have a sweet sibling vibe, however. For his part, Pattinson proves he is much more than drowsy vamp Edward Cullen.

Director Allen Coulter (“Hollywoodland”) has a heavy hand at times, and screenwriter Will Fetters defensively undermines the value of poetry and introversion, which are what Tyler is all about. A big final coincidence is jarring. But it’s nice to see the “Alice in Wonderland” sculpture in Central Park co-opted as a movie prop, and “Remember Me” is well worth a look.

Source: Boston Herald