Producers: Oscar Boyson, Ricky Camilleri, Jon Wroblewski, David Duque-Estrada, Miles Skinner, Alex Hughes and Jaeden Martell Director: Oscar Boyson Screenplay: Ricky Camilleri and Oscar Boyson Cast: Jaeden Martell, Asa Butterfield, Chris Bauer, Becky Ann Baker, Avan Jogia, Anna Baryshnikov, Pippa Knowles, Noah Centineo, Jennifer Ehle, Danny McCarthy, Bobby Potts and Eric Hartwell Distributor: Picturehouse/WG Pictures
Grade: B
A planned but abandoned school shooting plays a central role in Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative “The Drama,” and the plot device appears again in Oscar Boyson’s debut film, which mixes drama and dark comedy in a similar fashion—and, frankly, more successfully.
Just as in Borgli’s superficially romantic piece, the lead couple here is a mismatched one. We’re introduced first to Balthazar Malone (Jaeden Martell), a rich kid living in a swank New York high-rise with his divorced, and distant, high society mother Nicole (Jennifer Ehle). He’s an emotionally stunted teen with a life coach (Noah Centineo), and he’s adopted the pose of a so-called crinfluencer, an internet influencer who bawls prodigiously online to suggest deep feelings about issues such as loneliness and school shootings. The only person he can talk to about his problems is his chauffeur Esteban (Billy Potts).
Balthy, as he calls himself, is infatuated with Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), a classmate who shows genuine commitment to the cause of school shootings when she engages with Gore (Danny McCarthy), the head of a campus drill on how to react to active shooters. After going to a demonstration she’s planned on the issue, he invites her to see his uploads, in which he blubbers out “We’re fighting for our lives here!” But when she realizes they’re little more than playacting, she’s disgusted.
Still, he persists, seizing on responses to his posts from a snarling fellow with the handle deathdealer16, who accuses him of being a wimp and claims to be planning a real school shooting. Balthy proposes that he and Eleanor contact the fellow and go to stop him, and when she refuses, he goes himself—fabricating a flirty female persona to catch the guy’s interest. When he gets to Fort Worth, where the young man lives, he’ll drop the imposture with a lame excuse and bond with the guy, he thinks.
His host turns out to be Solomon Jackson (Asa Butterfield), a scruffy, volatile sort who lives with his invalid grandmother Elaine (Becky Ann Baker) in a dumpy house. It’s eventually revealed that Solomon did once think about shooting up a school but never went through with it. And at the moment he’s facing a series of crises. The rent on the house is increasing. He’s just reconnected with his long-absent father Beaver (Chris Bauer), a money-grubbing hustler who convinces him to become a salesman for Thrush, a testosterone supplement he markets to crowds of desperate men alongside his partner Supes (Ava Jogia). And he’s just been fired from his job at a gas station store by Brian (Eric Hartwell), to whom clerk Taylor (Anna Baryshnikov) has complained about Solomon’s harassing her.
Balthy is drawn inevitably into Solomon’s personal difficulties, which grow increasingly desperate as it becomes apparent his father is merely using him as a stooge. His reaction is double-edged—he’s both fascinated and repelled by the Solomon, but doesn’t know how to escape his orbit. Eventually his influence on Solomon proves to have the opposite of the effect he’d supposedly hoped for, and tragedy results, with a deeply cynical ending back in New York.
“Balthazar” is extremely melodramatic, especially toward the close, but it’s helped by a convincing production, which contrasts the gleaming richness of the New York scenes with the seediness of those in Fort Worth (actually Arlington). Kudos to production designer and costumer Emily Constantino are in order. Cinematographer Christopher Messina and editors Nate DeYoung and Erin DeWitt bring a jittery, ragged feel to the proceedings, and though James William Blades’ score starts out sounding misleadingly like something for a teen raunch-fest, it grows starkly effective as the story progresses, and the needle dops add to the energy.
Newcomer Boyson coaxes fine performances from the supporting cast, with Bauer standing out as Solomon’s disreputable dad—but this is basically a two-hander, and both Martell and Butterfield are outstanding. The latter embodies Balthy’s vacuous shiftiness to perfection, but the latter is truly a revelation. From his earliest child turns, he’s presented an almost angelic-looking surface even when the characters have been less than noble. Here he’s not only almost unrecognizable physically, but genuinely frightening in the mixture of fear, anger, hope, brutality, desperation and naiveté he brings to Solomon. Together Martell and Butterfield do a remarkable double act.
“Our Hero, Balthazar” is melodramatic, but it addresses serious contemporary realities with candor and conviction. This low-budget effort puts Borgli’s pretentious “Drama” to shame.