Rocket Science isn’t
jet-propelled, that’s for sure. The very
loosely autobiographical narrative feature debut of Jeffrey Blitz, the director
of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound,
the movie is a slow-burning comedy of coming-of-age frustration — though like
its predecessor, it’s a work interested in the weight of words, and the power
attached to them.
(Reece Thompson, above) is masked by his stuttering problem, which dooms him to
outcast status. Ambitious, hyper-articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) 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.
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, 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
the forthcoming Superbad, which
presents its characters as walking bags of surging hormones, Rocket Science doesn’t completely shortchange
hormonal hijinks and acting out (at one point a character puts a cello through
a window… just because), but it does more fully present the awkwardness and
uncertainty that go hand in hand with teenage years, and shows how that as
often as not informs impulsive decisions and behavior that, on the surface, isn’t
necessarily sexual.
The supporting characters around Hal — from his perpetually
sweaty, snarling, obsessive-compulsive brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), to his
fractured mom’s new boyfriend (Stephen Park), the father of a classmate — are
all terrifically sketched, and the underplayed exchanges give the movie the
feel of a slowly developing Polaroid. It grows more substantial and rewarding
as it goes along. Funny, too, are the teasing, purposefully cornball
instrumental versions of the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up” and “Blister in the
Sun” that eventually explode into the cathartic renditions that have become alt-rock
radio staples. For the original redacted capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.