Search for a cure

Perceptive Thumbsucker ponders society’s ills

Seventeen-year-old Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci) sucks his thumb.

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His habit seems like a childish gesture, but in his world, childish gestures are relative. After all, his mother, Audrey (Tilda Swinton), wants to win a cereal company-sponsored date with a television star. And his father, Mike (Vincent D’Onofrio), is regret made flesh, a lumbering ex-high school jock whose football career was waylaid by an injury that haunts him well into adulthood.

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Defeat looms large over the Cobb clan, whose depression is not some aberration or freak occurrence but part and parcel of the world of Thumbsucker, based on the book by Walter Kirn but clearly inspired by the 24-hour neurosis machine of now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the mopey, confused Cobbs are us, reaching desperately for some antidote — be it thumb or cop-show sex fantasies — to a lingering funk.

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Like the rest of the world, Justin is encouraged to find a quick fix for his soggy thumb woes. New Age orthodontist Perry Lyman (Keanu Reeves), more head-shrinker than tooth-tamer, takes it upon himself to hypnotize Justin out of his lethargy.

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With his stoner cadences, grave whispers and embarrassing earnestness, Reeves has often been hilarity’s squeaky toy when he impersonates grown-ups. But the ticks that damn him in other roles make him perfectly suited to Perry, the kind of guy who favors framed photographs of wolves, pan flute music and the PC ethos of the Pacific Northwest.

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In Kirn’s sweeping indictment of a culture dependent upon therapy and pharmaceuticals to “cure” what ails us, school administrators push Ritalin for Justin’s motivational problems.

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Under the drug’s influence, Justin morphs overnight into a manic, overachieving master debater. Promoted from lackluster interlocutor to captain of the debate team, Justin is suddenly able to talk his parents and his coach, Mr. Geary (Vince Vaughn), into anything.

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It’s an especially welcome change to see Vaughn, who has always had a geeky, prissy thing going on beneath his self-assured cool cats, play an adult worried about his retreating hairline. He’s scarily overinvested in his beloved debaters, doing whatever it takes — applying mascara, buying beer — to win their affection.

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Movie audiences are well versed in angst-laced tales of coming home, from the gold standard of 1967’s The Graduate to another recent pharmacological opus, Garden State, about the clarity that arises when chemical dependencies are kicked.

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The problems that the definitive The Graduate laid out — false middle-class values, plastic — are still around, but now people suffer from the delusion that a little yellow pill will set it all straight. Teenagers used to see the world as fucked up, but now they’re told it’s all in their heads.

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Films about American teens often make their navel-gazing heroes underdog superstars and their families freak shows, but Thumbsucker’s charm is how it equalizes its family members. Director Mike Mills’ tender and appealing film somehow manages to do a parallel story about adult anxiety that feels as real and vivid as Justin’s teenage crisis.

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Thumbsucker joins the ranks of lo-fi indies like Garden State, Donnie Darko and Me and You and Everyone We Know that see an expression of larger cultural malaise in such scab-picking cinema.

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Though a little heavy on the wispy indie-rock expression of melancholia, Thumbsucker embraces a wide range of people and their problems, leaving you with a lasting warm glow. Even if there’s no cure for the world’s anxieties, at least we’re all in this thumbsucking together.