( CNN ) -- Charlize Theron won an Oscar for covering up her beauty and finding grains of sympathy , as well as revulsion , for the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in `` Monster . '' She deserves to win a second nomination for playing the sexy , unmoored , utterly reprehensible Mavis Gary in `` Young Adult . '' Mavis is one of those people blessed with good looks , talent and brains , but whose sense of entitlement far outstrips any civilized social boundaries . She 's a pure narcissist , oblivious to other people 's feelings and contemptuous of any experience that does n't feed her own ego . In other words , Mavis is another monster , but a monster who can pass for beautiful with only a couple of hours in the salon . As we know ( you see it spread all over the supermarket tabloids every week ) , there 's a perverse thrill in watching one of the beautiful people fall apart . And there 's some of that same schadenfreude in play while watching the new black comedy from the `` Juno '' combo , writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman . Mavis is a ghostwriter for a successful young adult book series , and even that minor claim to fame is soon to be extinguished : The series is played out and the novel she is working on will be the last of them . Perhaps that 's why she feels compelled to head back home when she receives an e-mail from an ex-boyfriend , Buddy Slade ( Patrick Wilson ) , announcing the birth of his first child . Figuring , very , very , wrongly , that this message must be some kind of coded cry for help , Mavis hops into her Mini and heads straight to Mercury , Minnesota , where she grew up , and where she means to reconnect with Buddy and free him from his domesticated servitude . As plans go , this one has `` recipe for disaster '' written all over it . But Mavis sees things differently : It 's all for love , a romantic quest , the oldest story in the book . First , though , she bumps into Matt ( Patton Oswalt ) , a broken-down part-time waiter with a bum leg , who claims to have had the locker next to hers all through high school . The cane is a giveaway - `` You 're the Hate Crime Guy ! '' -- the hetero victim of a gay-bashing in senior year that left him crippled and understandably bitter . Reitman punctuates the movie with shots of Mavis putting on her camouflage : nail treatments , wardrobe choices . She has style and beauty at her fingertips . But the first time we see her we get a keener sense of this woman on a precipice : sprawled face down in bed , half undressed , hungover . It 's the difference between Mavis as she wants to be seen and as she really is , if she could only admit it . Matt is the only one she allows into her trust , either because she badly needs a drinking buddy and he has a distillery in his garage , or because she 's so far above him in any social criteria that she understands he poses no discernible threat . But she 's wrong about this , too ( just as she 's wrong about everything ) . Hovering somewhere between Jiminy Cricket and partner-in-crime , Matt is the movie 's comic safety valve . Oswalt steers a path for us , transfixed , attracted and appalled by this woman 's reckless , tunnel-vision trajectory . Oswald is also the beneficiary of Cody 's most sardonic one-liners , and could wind up with an Oscar nomination of his own . Once or twice Mavis is permitted a shred of insight . Reluctantly reunited with her parents , she softly confesses that she thinks she might be an alcoholic . They foolishly laugh off the revelation , which if nothing else suggests where she may have come by her capacity for denial . Then toward the end , when denial just wo n't wash any longer , she talks about the necessity for change . But again , she chooses the wrong confessor , and promptly reverts to type . It 's a brave movie that crushes our hopes of redemption so conclusively , and a promising indication that Reitman and Cody are growing up . It 's not hard to spot familiar feminist , or postfeminist themes from Cody 's `` Juno '' and `` Jennifer 's Body '' here , reworked with greater complexity and depth . Partly that 's a tribute to Theron 's performance , of course , which never once succumbs to the `` psychotic prom queen b**** '' caricature that one character thinks she sees . Even when she 's at her worst ( almost all the time ) , there 's always an undertow of panic and disturbance in Mavis , the barely suppressed horror that time is running out and she 's thrown her eggs in the wrong basket . We may find it impossible to like her , but it 's easy to feel sorry for her .
Charlize Theron plays the sexy , unmoored , utterly reprehensible Mavis Gary in `` Young Adult '' Mavis is a ghostwriter for a successful young adult book series . She has been hired by her publisher to write about their latest release'The Girl