Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the Independent Spirit Awards, Rocket Science isn’t jet-propelled, that’s for sure. The very loosely autobiographical narrative feature debut of writer-director Jeffrey Blitz, the helmer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound, this criminally under-appreciated little gem from last year is a slow-burning comedy of coming-of-age frustration. Like its predecessor, it’s also a work interested in the weight of words, and the power attached to them — especially by adolescents.



The quick wit of lanky high school introvert Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson, above left) is masked by his stuttering problem, which dooms him to outcast status. Ambitious, hyper-articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick, above right) senses something in him, though, and recruits Hal to the school’s high-powered debate team. A warped romantic awakening ensues, though Ginny eventually manipulates Hal to her own ends, leading him to team up with an older, brilliant dropout — Ginny’s ex-partner, Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) — in an effort to wow the judges at the New Jersey state championship.

The supporting characters around Hal — from his snarling, obsessive-compulsive kleptomaniac brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), to his fractured mom’s new boyfriend (Stephen Park), the judge father of a classmate — are all terrifically sketched, and the underplayed exchanges with them give the movie the feel of a slowly developing Polaroid; it grows more substantial and rewarding as it goes along. Blitz has a deft touch with dialogue, and realizes that in life, but especially adolescence, everyone is the star of their own story, and motivated by self-interest.

Canted tales of adolescent angst like these are a festival circuit staple (see Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, et al), but what Rocket Science most has going for it is its own strong sense of style and identity and a great, inviting deadpan lead performance from Thompson. Tossing aside the typical pat conventions and rigidly defined solitary motivations of such stories, Blitz conjures up a rich world of pubescent bewilderment and ecstatic agony. The flip side of something like Superbad, which presents its young characters as walking bags of surging hormones, Rocket Science doesn’t completely shortchange hormonal hijinks and acting out. (At one point Hal gets drunk and tosses an instrument through Ginny’s window, leading to the hilarious, shrugging mock-confession, “There’s a cello in your house now.”) But it does more fully present the awkwardness and uncertainty that go hand in hand with teenage years, and shows how those emotions as often as not inform impulsive decisions and behavior that, on the surface, isn’t necessarily sexual.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Rocket Science comes presented in letter-boxed 16×9 widescreen, with English 5.1 and Spanish 2.0 Dolby audio tracks, and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Apart from a paper insert touting other Picturehouse/HBO Films DVD releases, and a three-minute music video for Clem Snide and Eef Barzelay’s “I Love the Unknown,” the only supplemental bonus feature on the DVD is a 13-minute making-of featurette. While this behind-the-scenes production sketch — including interviews with Thompson, Kendrick, Piazza, D’Agosto and Aaron Yoo, as well as Blitz — is nicely done, and packed with solid information from a cast who, collectively and individually, really get the material, even more from Blitz would have been warmly welcome. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C (Disc)