Thumbsucker

Thumbsucker lives in the world of the dirty Q-word. If you promise not to tell anyone, I'll tell you what the word is. It's "quirky." It's a word that hip filmmakers these days don't like to hear, because they consider their work deeper or more meaningful than the glossy indication of the Q-word.

Quirky means a sensibility skewed slightly toward the precious, toward the smallest detail and toward the magnification of minute character flaws for slight comic benefit. And so, in the case of Thumbsucker, there's really no denying it's innate Q-ness. It's got your innocent young teenager (lovely acting here from Lou Pucci), who grows through run-ins with quirky characters played by Vince Vaughn, Benjamin Bratt, Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves. He and Reeves' character have especially bizarre (dare I say quirky?) encounters in which the young teen discovers his "power animal." (Pucci's power animal is a young doe, which allows the actor to actually touch a young doe, which has to be an exciting experience for anyone-they look very soft.)

Thumbsucker is not going to take you on a journey you haven't been on before, mainly because we've already experienced puberty, but also because we've had dramatized versions of the teenage years shoved down our throats ever since The O.C. gave us the Fantastic Four sponsored by Juicy Couture. As a story and as a film, it falls in between Harold and Maude (minus Maude, leaving just Harold, although without his strange obsession with suicide) and Thirteen (minus the teenage girl freakiness), which would imply that it is an absolutely excellent film. It is not quite that caliber of work, but it does contain aspects of both films, the dangerous edge of nearly all post-Donnie Darko teenage-angst films and the sweetness and pop-indie infused haze of retro-cool filmmaking in films like Garden State.

Director/Writer Mike Mills is an acclaimed music video director, and his visual style is well suited to the big screen-it's just that Thumbsucker is so derivative (and, almost happy to be so, which is refreshing in its own ironic post-modern way) that it's hard to give it a hearty thumbs-up.