Hesher (2010)

Hesher arrives from 2010 with the confidence of a film that has nothing to sell. A boy named T.J. loses his mother in a car crash. His father dissolves into pills. His grandmother dies quietly in her chair. Into this house walks a foul-smelling metalhead who sleeps on the couch, sets a tow truck driver's car on fire, and offers no wisdom whatsoever. The cast is white, the setting is a Los Angeles suburb, and the film's concerns are entirely domestic. Nobody in this story is assembled to represent anyone.

Consider the funeral. Hesher, drunk, delivers a monologue about the time he blew up a gas tank and lost a testicle, then explains that he spent so long mourning the testicle that he forgot he still had another one, plus a working penis. It is a crude, intimate, oddly effective piece of consolation. It is not a lecture. The film contains no lecture. Nicole, the grocery clerk played by Natalie Portman, has money problems, and the screenplay treats them as money problems, not as evidence of a broken system. Nothing is diagnosed. Nothing is prescribed.

There is a kind of relief in a film this indifferent to instruction. It premiered at Sundance, collected mixed reviews, and lost money. It has no sequel, no franchise, no message. The title character was modeled on Metallica's late bassist, a detail the film offers without comment. It offers Joseph Gordon-Levitt committing fully to a greasy, unlikable creation, and a final image of spray paint on a roof. We are left to classify it, and the classification is simple: a small, sad, funny film about grief, made before anyone expected movies to teach.