Go get it. Pretty damn good–great for an hour, then it kind of veers too much into the quirky conventional road-movie romance fantasy it so adroitly avoids and disrupts before that, but… I was sold by then. It’s anchored by a(nother) great performance by Lou Taylor Pucci, as a kid taken by an urge to get unstuck, so he steals a car… everything else about the plot emerges en route, so I won’t spoil up front. But there’s some dialogue and supporting performances that are sly, strange, occasionally idiosyncratically wonderful–particularly Bill Duke, as a traveling liquor salesman. And besides Pucci the film boasts a great M. Ward soundtrack.
Yeah, I liked this well enough, though maybe not as much as Reynolds. The first twenty-two minutes were really surprising and genuinely quirky (visually and narratively), and I wasn’t entirely sure where the film would lead me. I particularly enjoyed a sequence at an art/farm collective (an artists’ retreat where ceramic art and crafts were made; but also something of a hippie commune). I don’t know . . . it’s just that this sequence felt like something you might encounter in a T. Coraghessan Boyle short story, and I wished we had stayed there a bit longer (actually, I could have stayed there for the entirety). The rest of the film is certainly well-anchored by Pucci (why has this actor not yet taken off) and an uncharacteristically down-to-earth Zooey Deschanel, but it devolves more often than not into a certain kind of Indie Sundance preciousness. If you know M. Ward, then you’ve heard these songs many times before; they just don’t feel fully integrated into the film (a better example of an indie singer/songwriter making a central contribution to the success of a film is Badly Drawn Boy’s original soundtack for About a Boy). I think Thumbsucker to be a far superior film (another excellent Lou Taylor Pucci performance) as far as the indie, coming-of-age genre goes.