Maik (Tristan Gobel) is a loner at school, and it doesn't help that at home his mother is in rehab and his father is away with his assistant. He has the hots for classmate Isa (Nicole Mercedes Muller) but is too quiet and bookish to talk to her. Then one day early in the term, a new boy named Andrej Tschichatschow (Anand Batbileg), nicknamed "Tschick," arrives at school and immediately earns Maik's contempt. He's Maik's polar opposite: brash, rebellious, assertive and non-conformist. Before long, though, they find common ground and reluctantly bond. Now Tschick steals a very old car and drives it over to Maik's home, where he persuades Maik to join him on an impromptu road trip across Germany. From there, they see the sights and get to know themselves and each other even deeper, with Isa in tow for the last stretch.
This adaptation of Wolfgang Herndorf's 2010 really is as derivative and predictable as I've just made it sound. Director and co-writer Fatih Akin evidently wanted to navigate these three characters' trajectories with sincerity and sympathy and he manages that, but at the great expense of narrative freshness and aesthetic flair and shrewdness. The pacing is too slow and uneven for a story that's meant to take place primarily in a moving car, and in concert with that the cinematography has the feel of a tourism commercial rather than an effort to invoke the landscape as a reflective metaphor for the protagonists coming of age.
The screenplay also has some downright patronising chunks of dialogue for these youngsters to speak, and the soundtrack is much too formal and instrumental for such a story. The only saving grace is the ensemble, who all give beautifully natural and layered turns (particularly Batbileg), and their chemistry is unmistakable. But besides that, quite frankly I don't give a tschick about Tschick.
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