Rocket Science

Enchanting in its self-effacing articulateness, Academy-Award-nominated documentarian Jeffery Blitz's Rocket Science isn’t quite good to the last drop but makes for an enjoyably awkward time anyway. Blitz’s stuttering hero is Hal Hefner (the intriguing newcomer, Reece Daniel Thompson); trapped with a dim-witted, simultaneously brutal and tender brother Earl (Vincent Piazza); a mildly depressed father (Denis O’Hare) who, without explanation, leaves his wife (Lisbeth Barlett), a banal New Jersey woman and mother who doesn’t quite know what to make of her life. Hal’s alienation is set up in Blitz’s skillfully comedic exposition, in which we also meet Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), the overachieving debate team captain who with her partner and lover Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) strikes fear into the hearts of debate squads across the state of New Jersey. When Ben has a breakdown, mid-debate, and relocates to the urban seclusion of Trenton, Ginny recruits Hal, the stutterer, to replace him. But wait--why on Earth would she do that?

If this were a formulaic Hollywood effort, she’d seduce him after playing hard to get, but her motives prove far tricker in Blitz’s script, which allows Kendrick to provide one of the most winning performances by a young actress in some time. The scenes in which the stuttering Thompson and the uber-polished Kendrick square off are examples of pristine comedic timing married to smart writing. As she tries to turn him into the debater he will never be, the logical, mainstream-oriented conclusion of the narrative we’ve come to expect from the set-up is gently subverted by Blitz’s keen understanding of the fact that few of us every overcome our central inadequacies; we just learn to live with them better. Or we don’t. Rocket Science is built for a small seven-figure sale, distribution on a few hundred screens, and a strong life on DVD. Cut it some slack. Even if all these high schoolers are really in their twenties.

                                                       Brandon Harris