You can’t simply warn them. They can’t see it. They won’t. They’re young. They’re immortal.

Those “alcohol problems” are for older people. Those times they wake up and they don’t know where they are, how they got there? Accidents. They laugh it off. “I got carried away.” Maybe they just need to “ease off,” “slow down.”

It doesn’t matter if they’re Lindsay or Amanda in the tabloids, or Kate the school teacher just down the street, they won’t see the spiral they’re in until they hit bottom and they’re looking back up at how they got there.

Every generation needs its “Days of Wine and Roses,” a reminder that even if you just think you’re just having a good time, the bottle is a self-administered anesthetic. And crawling into it puts you on your knees.

That’s what “Smashed” is, a sober, honest and amusingly flippant peek into abuse by somebody who figures she’s too young to have a problem. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the object of desire in “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World,” gives a career-making performance as Kate, a young married teacher who hasn’t matured out of hitting the pool halls and bars every night with her adoring journalist husband, Charlie (Aaron Paul, also quite good).

She has a beer in the shower, nips at her whiskey flask in car and throws up in front of the first graders at the California school where she’s a bubbly, animated and enthusiastic young teacher.

That’s not her first tip that all isn’t well, but it’s a biggie. The kids corner her into claiming she’s pregnant. Her principal (Megan Mullally) goes overboard in the sympathy department. But a colleague (Nick Offerman) sees through her.

Nothing about “Smashed” is novel or new. But Winstead and Paul give this lean little film an unblinking honesty that lifts it beyond genre.