In Greg Mottola’s semi-autobiographical film, “Adventureland,” Jesse Eisenberg plays an Ivy League graduate whose plans for a European holiday are quashed when his parents suffer financial woes and he is forced to work a summer job at a decrepit amusement park, circa 1987.
What he assumes will be a tedious summer turns into a personal and sexual rite-of-passage when he meets Emily (Kristen Stewart of “Twilight”) and begins a complicated romance.
The 25-year-old Eisenberg has emerged as one of the most sensitive performers of his generation and a go-to actor for filmmakers making movies about themselves as insecure young intellectuals in crisis. In Noah Baumbach’s Oscar-nominated “The Squid and the Whale,” Eisenberg played a pompous son of literati parents undergoing a bitter divorce.
James, his character in “Adventureland,” is a sweet but fretful writer mortified by his descent into the job hell of a games operator at the park.
In a recent interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, Eisenberg was erudite, funny, self-aware and said he identifies with James’ tendency to “overexplain things.” While he is currently signed to act in a number of films and is developing a movie inspired by a relative who is a Holocaust survivor, he mostly tries to keep a low profile as a student at Manhattan’s New School, where he studies democracy and cultural pluralism.
“I don’t tell anybody I’m an actor, because it feels kind of obnoxious and arrogant to be in movies — like you’re putting yourself out there to be seen,” he said. He describes himself as an intensely private person who is fortable when strangers recognize him on the street.
Eisenberg was raised in something of a show business family in Queens, N.Y. and East Brunswick, N.J. His younger sister, Hallie Kate Eisenberg, starred as a child in films such as “Paulie” and “The Insider,” and his mother was a professional birthday party clown.
“As a child I suffered from terrible separation anxiety,” he said. “I had emotional issues, but many actors do, which is why we are emotionally accessible.”
Eisenberg attended Hebrew school, but dropped out at age 11 and declined to become bar mitzvah. “I didn’t feel a connection to it,” he said, “and neither did my friends, yet they wanted to have their parties. I don’t want to sound like a martyr, but I would have felt guilty going through with it, because it would have meant something I wasn’t able to commit to.”
Instead he pursued acting and, while still in high school, was cast as a 16-year-old virgin seeking seduction advice from an uncle in 2002’s “Roger Dodger.”
Two months ago, Eisenberg wrapped production on “Holy Rollers,” about a Chasidic man who is lured into becoming an Ecstasy dealer by a friend with ties to an Israeli cartel; he also has a movie deal to adapt his play, “The Revisionist,” which is inspired in part by his own family’s experiences in Europe before and after World War II.
During one of his weekly visits to his 97-year-old aunt in New York, Eisenberg promised to visit her native village in Poland after wrapping production on “The Hunting Party” in Bosnia several years ago.
On the road trip there — which sounds like something out of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated” — he had to pay off Polish police in cash after a car accident, managing to arrive unscathed at his aunt’s childhood home on the town square in Krasnystaw. In another city, he met a cousin who had survived the Holocaust by hiding with a Catholic family as a girl.
Her stories about the war and its aftermath prompted him to write “The Revisionist.”
“It is about this 25-year-old, [lousy] science fiction novelist who goes to Poland to visit a second cousin because he thinks if he does something dramatic in his life, it will inspire him to finish this bad book,” he said.
Eisenberg hopes to play the male lead in the film adaptation of the play; in the meantime, he spent recent weeks dutifully making the interview rounds for “Adventureland.”
In response to one question, he said he was able to find aspects of himself in the film’s main character. “James has all these lofty ambitions, but at the same time he doesn’t have enough confidence to pursue them, and I feel the exact same way,” he said.
“On the one hand, I want to be in movies, and I have all these projects I want to do, but on the other hand, I have to then force myself to go contend with the world.”
“Adventureland” opened April 3 and is still playing at Bay Area theaters.