Adult World

Adult World is a 2013 American comedy-drama film directed by Scott Coffey and written by Andy Cochran. The film stars Emma Roberts, Evan Peters, and John Cusack. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 2013, and was released to select theaters and through video on demand on February 14, 2014, by IFC Films. Plot Recent college graduate Amy believes she's destined to be a great poet. Pressed by her parents to earn a living, she takes a job at a small sex shop, Adult World, where she works with the manager, Alex. When her car is stolen, her parents discover that she had canceled the car's theft insurance to afford submission fees for poetry journals, and call her a child, which causes her to pack and leave. She briefly moves in with a coworker, trans woman Rubia, before finding her own apartment. She meets one of her favorite poets, Rat Billings, and talks her way into being his protégée by offering to clean his house. After some cajoling, Billings reads her poetry and offers to feature her work in an anthology he is working on. One night, she gets drunk and makes a clumsy attempt to seduce him, but he rebuffs her advances. Alex fires Amy after she fails to catch a shoplifter; angered, she says she is too good to work there. She soon discovers that she misses Alex, however, and realizes that she has feelings for him. She apologizes to him and asks for her job back. Alex rehires her, and they begin hanging out. At Amy's birthday party, Billings gives her a copy of the poetry anthology he featured her work in—Shit Poems: An Anthology of Bad Verse. Furious and humiliated, she confronts him and calls him a has-been. She goes home and tries to commit suicide by asphyxiating herself with a plastic bag, but changes her mind at the last second.