Hesher: Just Shut Up And Burn It

 "I'm just not happy. I'm just not happy. I'm just not happy because my life didn't turn out the way I thought it would." Hey! Join the fucking club, ok!? I thought I was going to be the starting center fielder for the Boston Red Socks. Life sucks, get a fucking helmet, allright?! "I'm not happy. I'm not happy." Nobody's happy, ok!?Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That's it, ok! You cum, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to fucking work, ok!? That is it! End of fucking list! "I'm just not happy." Shut the fuck up, allright? That's the name of my new book, "Shut the Fuck Up, by Doctor Denis Leary. A revolutionary new form of therapy." I'm gonna have my patients come in. "Doctor, I.." "Shut the fuck up, next!" "I don't feel so.." "Shut the fuck up, next!" "He made me feel so much better about myself, you know? He just told me to shut the fuck up and nobody had ever told me that before. I feel so much better now."

Denis Leary - No Cure For Cancer

 

 

 

HESHER is film filled with many disparate elements that never quite gel together into a homogeneous entity. For one it features a truly glorious performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt fusing a punk rock Jesus with an unleashed id. It also manufactures an oddly jarring mix of scatological black humour and pensive sadness. This defiantly strange combination of tonal characteristics is always watchable if not always successful.

 

HESHER begins with TJ, a young boy who lost his mother in a car accident barely two months ago. His father (Rainn Wilson in a great, uncharacteristic turn) spends his days on the couch in a near-comatose state of pill munching depression and his grandmother (Piper Laurie, also fantastic especially in one sneakily touching scene where Hesher teaches her how to smoke a bong) tries to keep everyone together with a meal every night despite her ailments and borderline senility. TJ is a socially withdrawn kid, bullied at school and prone to destructive tendencies. As he smashes a window at a rundown house one day he meets Hesher, a long-haired, often shirtless, metal head.

 

Hesher doesn't so much befriend TJ as end up squatting in TJ's house. Neither TJ or his father can do much about it as Hesher aggressively makes himself at home. Natalie Portman also skirts the main narrative playing a woefully underwritten check-out chick at the local supermarket with problems of her own.

 

Spencer Susser's debut feature film plays an odd game of being unique and conventional at the same time. HESHER essentially is a classic tale of the stranger who ingratiates himself into the home of a family with various domestic difficulties. As the family struggle with their problems, this mysterious stranger opens their eyes to any number of unforeseen aspects of life they were previously closed off to. This is an oft-told story ranging from Jean Renior's masterful BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING to Schepisi's SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION and Susser (with Aussie co-writer ANIMAL KINGDOM's David Michod) is very aware of the formula they are working in.

 

Hesher is not a traditional guardian angel savior character. In fact much of the time he couldn't care less about helping the family. He routinely ignores TJ's cries for help as he gets beaten up by a bully and he has a disturbing penchant for setting things on fire. This punky subversion of convention through immaturity results in HESHER generating a constantly fascinating if fractured viewing experience.

 

The quote that led this piece off is from Denis Leary and for me it seems to be the over-arching 'moral' of the film. Hesher even gives a particularity amusing speech near the close of the story that sums up everything Susser and Michod want to say with this film while couching it all in a giant cock and ball joke. Shut the fuck up, stop complaining about your life and get on with it. It's a perfectly nihilistic coming-of-age story where the lesson is, we all need to trash and burn some stuff every now and then.

 

HESHER premiered in a slightly unfinished form over 18 months ago at Sundance 2010. Since then it has strangely sat on the shelf despite being picked up by a distributor rather promptly after that screening. It doesn't surprise me that they didn't know what to do with the film. HESHER is literally the definition of a niche film. I'm not sure who this type of subversive genre flick would appeal to. There are laughs in the film but they are certainly buried deep and pitched as dry & black as they could be. Also the ultimate resolution is far too conventional for true fans of alternative cinema but the convention of the sentiment at the climax of this story feels like a subversive act in and of itself.

 

I really enjoyed HESHER and I'm gonna go ahead and recommend it to all reading this. Not everyone of you is going to like it. Some of you will probably hate it and others will be just plain bored but there certainly is a lot of interesting things going on in here. It's an imperfect film, full of rough edges, great Metallica tunes, transformative performances (Gordon-Levitt is astonishingly magnetic) and general despair mixed with crude black humour. HESHER is all jumbled up into a package that is so strangely watchable that it deserves to be seen. Give it a go.