Repeat after me this one rule and,
maybe, I won’t have to hurt you: “In art, unlike politics, church, school and
daytime TV, sentimentality is the one unforgivable sin.” Now listen up as I
tell you the story of a little boy – actually, thirteen is not so little but
it’s a movie and there is the big bad old rating board to consider – this boy
has recently lost his mom in traffic and he is very sad. The boy, TJ (newcomer
Devin Brochu is undersized for his age and so doesn’t look completely
ridiculous on one of those cut off little bikes) lives with a dad, Paul (Rainn
Wilson) who’s so sad that he’s grown a bushy beard and spends most of his days
hibernating on the couch; then there’s grandma (Piper Laurie) who’s sad because
her men folk treat her like a house plant.
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As a grownup friend of TJ’s says “Sometimes
things are so bad and you think it can’t get any worse and then you discover
whole new ways it can get worse.” For the Forney clan, worse arrives in the
form of a skinny tattooed bad ass dude, Hesher. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the
whole show absolutely stealing scene after scene as a foul mouthed, pranky,
heavy metal worshipping caveman, who walks around in his Jockey shorts
-- this is the first major indie I can recall where a
straight identified sexy terrorist is allowed to intimidate the universe with a
barely concealed perpetual hard on. Writer/director Spencer Susser -- with
co-writer David Michod (creator of last year’s sensational Aussie crime family
meltdown Animal Kingdom) succeed in creating a unique anti-hero who at
least appears to fear no man’s authority: Hesher symbolically castrates the dad
by defying him to physically eject him from the house – since Hesher is all but
naked for another man to as much as touch him involves crossing all sorts of
prickly taboos.
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Director Spencer Susser
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If Hesher had been launched
from the Ultima Thule of the former Soviet empire the sassy punk’s cruelty might
truly have risen to delightfully demonic heights – in James Gray’s implacably
honest and icy tale of Brooklyn’s Russian-Jewish Mafia, Little Odessa, a
young boy (Edward Furlong) is devoured by the forces represented by his evil
hit man brother (Tim Roth). But for all it bad boy cultural trappings, Hesher
– in part inspired by the spirit of metal super band Metallica’s former
bassist Cliff Burton – has a sticky little, dare we say, sentimental heart and
if you look carefully you’ll see a sneaky remake of such 80’s boy vs. bully
revenge fueled melodramas as My Body Guard.
To their credit the makers of Hesher
don’t crumble into weepy mush hearts until the bitter end when three
characters hijack a coffin out of one of those trademark American pious death
rituals called a memorial service.
At first Hesher earns our love by
treating TJ with a ferocious abandon -- running him over with his van in the
family driveway, not coming to his rescue when the school bully pushes the
kid’s head into a toilet and finally making fun of TJ’s burgeoning interest in
the adult cashier at the supermarket (Natalie Portman).
But in a cosmos where the real
targets are all off limits: religion, inequality of wealth and opportunity and,
of course, sex, attempts to make game changing, shit disturbing statements
inevitably give way to all sorts of invisible restraints. There are those rare
courageous films: Donnie Darko, LIE, Igby Goes Down that create their
own rules of engagement with a hopelessly smug and conflicted dystopian society
like ours, Hesher, sadly is not one of these, but it’s not everyday that
you get to see a brilliant soloist like Joseph Gordon-Levitt literally prance
around half naked as if in the service of a Pasolini, or a Scorsese. This naked
Joe is several notches above his trafficking in depravity bad ass in the third
rate Elmore Leonard thriller Kill Shots. (-30-)