Hesher (2010)

My preliminary response to watching this movie was teenager-text-message-esque. It went something like this:
OMG!! Whaaaaat the helllllll?????
And also a little like this:
awwwwwwwww. :(

Unfortunately, these thoughts, albeit stunningly poetic, do not a legitimate blog post make. An attempt at a slightly more elevated, articulated evaluation follows.

If you don't know already, Hesher is a movie about the harshly arbitrary realities of trying to get through everyday life while dealing with the loss of a loved one. In it, a middle school-ish aged boy named T.J. grapples not only with the untimely death of his mother, but also the subsequent loss of his father to an entirely crippling grief (played with eyebrow raising depth by Rainn Wilson). T.J. has to navigate the uncertain waters of "where to go from here" alone, until one day he encounters the extremely unpleasant, yet well meaning miscreant Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Hesher was one of those rare, artistically successful movies in which form and thematic content serve each other quite well. In other words, the overall aesthetic effect (editing, mise-en-scene, performances, pacing, etc) helped carry the central ideas of the movie across. Gordon-Levitt's character is a literal manifestation of the feelings of turmoil and lawlessness trauma can create for people who find their whole worlds destroyed overnight. Though some may argue that many of Hesher's antics, and indeed the movie's events overall are totally over the top, they do all serve the central purpose of illustrating how crazy the world can seem when it changes for you brutally and unexpectedly overnight.

Another success of Hesher is that it somehow manages to feel genuine yet fairytale-like, hyperbolic and understated. It never lets you feel predictable sentiments, yet the emotions it manages to convey are indisputably real.

I very much recommend this movie, but only if you are prepared to accept the unexpected.