‘Hesher’ focuses on a guy who lights swimming pools on fire for fun and refuses to listen to anything but Metallica. Here’s the kicker: You’ll love him.
By: Roxana Hadadi
It seems unfeasible that a guy with tattoos of the middle finger and a stick person killing himself, who only seems to have one pair of underwear, who only listens to Metallica and who often threatens to harm a middle school student, would be inspirational in any way. But Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so often pegged as charmingly genial and unthreatening (see: his opening monologue for the November 2009 episode he hosted of “Saturday Night Live”), makes it work in “Hesher.”
Maybe you’re old enough to remember Gordon-Levitt as the alien trapped in a kid’s body on ‘90s sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun,” or maybe you saw him sing and dance as the lovestruck Tom in 2009’s “(500) Days of Summer.” So cute! So floppy-haired! So grinning and lovable! But Gordon-Levitt first showed signs of such grittiness years ago, in the 2004 drama “Mysterious Skin” and 2005 neo-noir “Brick,” and he taps into that hard edge here. Hesher (Gordon-Levitt) is like a phantom — he appears out of nowhere and fits right in, infiltrating the lives of strangers so messed up they don’t even notice, or care, that he’s ingratiated somewhere he doesn’t belong. He doesn’t have any family, any backstory, any character development beyond what you see onscreen — and he doesn’t need any.
Instead, what makes Hesher so compelling is his whole-hearted need to live in the present, a disturbingly passionate mindset that has no space for considering consequences. He’s pure id, delighting in lighting things on fire and having sex with girls and ruining other people’s secrets — until he’s suddenly not anymore. Until the reality of people and their hardships catches up to him. Until he decides to maybe care about them, too. Until he starts directing his mania into doing what he thinks is helping them, like a white knight coming in on a roaring inferno, inadvertently obliterating everything he tries to save.
But Gordon-Levitt and his unhinged-yet-insightful teenager isn’t the main star of this film — he backs up a fantastic performance from young actor Devon Brochu (most recently in “Rubber,” sadly the worst thing I’ve seen so far this year) as T.J., who’s wandering through the world in a daze caused by his mother’s death in a car accident two months ago. He can’t connect with his father, Paul (Rainn Wilson), whose sad-man beard and pill addiction show his grief, and his grandmother (Piper Laurie) provides meals and affection but is struggling with cancer.
And T.J.’s problems are compounded when he tries to save the car his mother died in, provoking the ire of older teen Dustin (Brendan Hill), who works at the car dealership where Paul sold the SUV. With Dustin constantly abusing T.J. — from shoving his face in a urinal cake to trying to run him over with his car — the kid has few people to turn to. When compassionate grocery clerk Nicole (Natalie Portman) steps in during a beating from Dustin, T.J. gains one ally — and when he disturbs Hesher, who is illegally crashing in a half-finished house in town, he kind of gains another.
What are Hesher’s motives? He sneaks into T.J.’s life and house, doing laundry, eating his family’s food and watching their TV, rewiring it so he can watch pornography. Hesher observes T.J.’s father’s detachment, his grandmother’s loneliness, his growing crush on Nicole and the abuse from Dustin, and soon he begins to care — but his solutions to bullying and parental ignorance aren’t composed, calm or logical. Most of the time, they’re not even legal, landing T.J. in even more trouble that the kid, drowning in a world of grief, can’t see a way out of.
There are two ways to see “Hesher,” and the R-rated film will certainly divide audiences into one camp who can stomach the film’s numerous obscenities, sexually explicit dialogue and shocking violence (some explosions and an attack with garden shears) for its affecting emotional core, and another who won’t be able to get past all the f-words and bullying. The language will certainly offend some audience members (it is certainly too intense for young teens, but older ones have heard all this before), but the nuances of “Hesher,” the cocked eyebrows from Gordon-Levitt and the tear-filled eyes from Brochu, are what make that absurdity worth it.
Rage and resentment define “Hesher,” and its rawness is what will resonate — what this social outcast and this depressed family see in each other, and what you’ll see, will be more impactful to audiences than the four-letter words thrown around. We’re all lost, the film’s writer and director Spencer Susser argues, but it’s how we eventually come to terms with that meaningless that matters. With “Hesher,” that’s what you’ll remember.
