Michael Cera plays Bleeker, the father of Juno’s baby. As usual, he delivers a quietly hillarious and effective performance. Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons play Juno’s parents, and Simmons really nails a supportive, though largely clueless character. If there’s one thing I learned from Oz, it’s that J.K. Simmons is the scariest man in the world. (And if there are two things I learned from Oz, number two would be that it hurts when a spoon goes, you know, there.)
Given that I have longstanding love affairs with pretty much everybody in the cast, Ellen Page was at something of a disadvantage. I really only know her as Kitty in the X-Men movies, but she’s well-regarded for her performance in Hard Candy. She has to carry the movie, as she appears in just about every scene, and she completely won me over. Juno’s a great sarcastic-girl-nerd character, which is not a character you often see. And when you do, they are never really believable as actual people. (With the possible exception of Ghost World, though even there the character arc doesn’t really track.)
