Wonderful Rocket Science Top of the Class

Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) doesn’t feel like he’s destined for greatness. His stuttering problem makes it nearly impossible for this bright and intellectually acute High School to answer questions in class let alone order a piece of pizza from the belligerent lunch lady. His older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), a bit of an obsessive-compulsive as well as a budding kleptomaniac, tends to push him around mercilessly, while the abrupt breakup of parents Juliet (Lisbeth Bartlett) and Daryl (Dennis O’Hare) certainly doesn’t help with the boy’s self-esteem.

Reece Thompson in Picturehouse's Rocket Science

But things start looking up when the unthinkable happens. The highly driven and extremely articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), star member of the school debate team, claims to see magnetic potential in this awkward mess of a student. She convinces a highly adoring Hal to become her partner, claiming she can mold and train him to overcome his disabilities and become a champion. 

Needless to say, the young man is immediately smitten. The road ahead is not exactly what it seems, however, and soon Hal has his dreams of love shattered and his hopes for debating brilliance brutally hindered. Soon he’s searching out Ginny’s former partner the brilliant (if disgraced) Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto) for help, the two of them coming up with a plan of attack that could see both their futures changed forever.

I loved Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science. For one thing, this is one of the few movies in recent memory that I have seen where I actually didn’t know what was going to happen next. Every time I thought the filmmaker’s script was going to fall into either cliché or familiarity the film suddenly took a right turn towards something completely different. I was fascinated by both the story being told and with the characters inhabiting it, the movie so universal and emotionally complex I was almost overwhelmed by its colorfully dexterous power.

Who knew Blitz had a fictional debut like this one in him? I liked his Spelling Bee documentary Spellbound as much as anyone, but I still didn’t think he’d be capable of taking a genre as familiar and routine as this and spin it on its ear quite so splendidly. These kids aren’t your typically irregular High School comedy regulars chasing their hormonal impulses with impudent gross-out glee, they are instead real people dealing with all the cruel uncertainties and glorious possibilities adolescence offers. I knew these guys, went to school with them, was probably even one of them at one time, so watching Hal deal with everything spiraling chaotically around him was both painful and cathartic all at once.

Obviously this doesn’t make the film an always easy or comfortable experience. More, the lead-up to the (admittedly brilliant) climax is a tad rushed and a bit unfocused, Ben’s solutions to help Hal overcome his stuttering ingenious if a bit out of left field. A couple of other moments also seemed overly cruel to me, and while I realize they were necessary to facilitate our hero’s transformation that still didn’t make them any easier to watch. 

But all of this is okay because Blitz gets so much right a couple missteps aren’t about to derail the picture’s success. This is one of the more remarkable and fascinatingly intoxicating debuts I’ve seen all year. It is a rousing adventure of personal discovery impossible to resist, both Thompson and Kendrick so good I can’t wait to see what either of them does next. Add all this together and Rocket Science isn’t just at the top of its class, it also deserves a gold star.

Film Rating:  êêê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Rocket Science Theatrical Trailer