Spencer Susser's film Hesher is a really difficult but totally fun experience. It's one of the darkest comedies I've seen in a long time and it's also one of the most disturbing. It's a ode to anarchy and the shitiness of life.
T.J. (Devin Brochu) is a high school underclassman whose mother recently died in a car accident. He doesn't have any friends and he and his father (Rainn Wilson) live with his grandmother (Piper Laurie) in her tired house in the Valley. One day on the way to school he stops by a housing development and throws a rock through the window, not knowing that there's a degenerate metalhead, Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sleeping inside. When Hesher is subsequently kicked out the squat, he shows up at T.J.'s house and moves in (after threatening T.J. with a plant clipper).
T.J. is harassed at school by a bully, and one day, he's chased into the parking lot of a grocery store. There he's defended by Nicole (Natalie Portman), a down-on-her-luck twenty-something whose life also sucks and is in a permanent rut. T.J. falls for her (she's at least 10 years older than he is). Aside from living with his family, Hesher mostly enjoys making T.J.'s life difficult, inciting the bully to further acts of violence, mocking him and his crush on Nicole, cozying up to his grandmother and father. Au much as T.J. hates Hesher and wants to get rid of him, he likes the attention he's getting and appreciates that Hesher's the only person in the world who give a crap about him.
I keep feeling this movie is a lot like that '80s Matt Dillon movie My Bodyguard - but much darker and more cynical. Hesher is T.J.'s bodyguard, but as he is an anarchist, he doesn't ask for anything in return and doesn't totally care about anyone. He seems to be hanging around T.J. because it's something to do. He's not really teaching him any lessons or helping him out at all. He's just really bored and the family is so damaged (dad's on anti-depressants and gran is sorta old and loopy) that they don't tell him no. There's a definite Existentialist streak here... Hesher never moves along... there's nothing to be done.
Aside from that, this is a shockingly violent, frank movie. There's one scene involving those plant clippers that's so gross I get sick thinking about it now. There's lots of fire and drinking and puking. It's all a bit funny (though not really as out and out comic book gonzo as in Super).
The film has that 'tired brown' look that lots of movies have now. Every interior is filled with tons of crap. The clothes that everyone wears are out of fashion. Nat Portman wears granny glasses and looks particularly unwashed (one problem is that Portman is simply too good looking that even wearing bad clothes and with bad hair, she's still hot; whatever the inverse of "lipstick on a pig" is what is going on here: bad glasses on a hottie; it doesn't totally work), to say nothing of Gordon-Levitt, who raises dirty to a new atmosphere.
The two lead performances, Gordon-Levitt and Brochu are both fantastic here. Brochu doesn't say much and mostly looks sad, but he's very powerful and his constant misery is great. Gordon-Levitt is great and doesn't go too far with the silliness of the role (which is possible when playing a character with a tattoo on his torso of a stick figure shooting his brains out and one on his back of a big hand with a middle finger). He's almost non-verbal, he's so drunk and sick the whole time. He's really great.
On a scale of from sick to funny, this falls somewhere closer to a horror movie than a rom-com. It really is one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile (thought much of that has to do with Gordon-Levitt's impeccable performance). This is a weird movie because it's so dark that its resolution almost is washed away by the pain and horribleness of the rest of the story... but it's really interesting and I really like what it's getting at.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
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