Movie Nation

It’s not the editor, but the editing strategy that undermines “Beautiful Boy.”

This sensitive retelling of the true story of journalist David Sheff and his son Nic, a drug addict whose crystal meth mania became two books — one written by the father, the other by his aspiring-writer/recovering addict son. Those dual narratives might account for the film’s choppy, disjointed feel and flow, a powerful and almost certainly compelling and intimate drama about parenting, personal responsibility and the shock waves that spread from one addict through an entire extended family.

Rarely has a film with alleged Oscar pretensions felt more “meh.” Sympathies are undercut, “big moments” are countered with off-key ones and suspense is frittered away like an addict’s college fund in this, the most scenic movie ever made on this subject.

Steve Carell is David, an indulgent dad given to singing John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” to son Nic from an early age. Nicolas was the son of his first marriage (brittle Amy Ryan is the first wife) who turns out to be the best older stepbrother ever when Dad’s remarriage (earthier Maura Tierney plays Karen, an artist) produces two moppets whom Nic (Timothée Chalamet) dotes on like puppies Dad just brought home.

Nic’s dad writes for Rolling Stone (among other publications), so the kid has access to all the best music and an affluent lifestyle in the most beautiful part of coastal California. But Dad tilts towards “Your best pal” in his parenting. “Let’s go surfing!” Let’s bang our heads to Massive Attack!

And then the kid counters with, “Let’s smoke this joint together, Dad.”

Nothing to worry about, right? We’re not still selling that “gateway drug” thing, are we? Not in San Francisco. Not at Rolling Stone!

“It takes the edge off stupid reality,” Nic says. Uh-oh.

As Flemish filmmaker Felix van Groeningen’s film skips back and forth through flashbacks and a floating fictive present that’s not a straight-forward narrative, we see David remember these moments and read into them the second-guessing that has to come with it.

The sweet kid is in rehab at 18 with a veritable cornucopia in his veins. We know now what David and Nic did not. That 28 days is not enough to break the meth habit.

We share David’s utter contempt for the rehab folks who excuse this failure with “Rehab is part of the recovery.” But being a journalist, David snoops around Nic’s room, his journals, and picks up clues. He buys a meal for another addict on the street to get a sense of the allure and consults with an expert (Timothy Hutton) who thinks he’s being interviewed for The New York Times Magazine, an expert who points out the deadly chemistry that makes meth so hard to shake.

Chalamet (“Call Me By Your Name”) is the very picture of mercurial in this part, gushing with enthusiasm and sweetness with his step-siblings one moment, lying, cheating stealing and relapsing the next. He’s got the guilty face of a student using the school library computer to look up “How to shoot up safely,” and the amorality of a junkie who thinks nothing of helping his college girlfriend (Kaitlyn Dever) learn to cook and shoot up, and then overdose. Chalamet manages a stoned-manic swagger as he insists on being “on my own” in his teens, and cadges cash to sustain his death spiral.

Tierney and Ryan play interesting “mother” contrasts and have some of the best scenes in the movie. Karen has to protect her own children, but something else kicks in when Nic and the girlfriend flee their house. She chases them down, weeping. Ex-wife Vicki (Ryan) didn’t get custody, but seems like Nic’s LA lifeline when the chips are down. If only she could break off the same fight she and David have been having for years.

Carell has the biggest part and he gives a most uneven performance in it. His David is a rational man more inclined to lose his temper over Nic’s evasions and others’ failure to watch the addict like a hawk. Carell’s emotional meltdowns seem forced and tepid and remind us we’ve never really seen him master that.

Only small pieces of the rehab experience seem novel here. I’d never heard of “The Three Cs” before — “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I cannot cure it.” All part of that surrendering to a higher power thing, and letting yourself off the hook just enough to get better.

But when Nic jots in his journal about the shame his drug use causes him and how he uses more drugs to forget the shame, you have to think, “Yeah, it’s like that.”

Director/co-writer van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) is out of his depth (that choppy editing) and treats this production like a Belgian kid at the Hollywood Buffet. The soundtrack is so littered with (pricey rights) songs you can tell he’s spending Other People’s Money, and some are so on the nose (Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” Perry Como covering “Sunrise, Sunset”) that they make you wince.

But it’s the cutting that undercuts this son’s journey through addiction and his father’s all-but-helpless response to it. The wind goes out of the movie’s narrative moment and the air leaves the balloon of Chalamet and Carell’s performances which we watch deflate as we lose too much of our sympathy for their story.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content throughout, language, and brief sexual material

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Steve Carell, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan

Credits:Directed by Felix van Groeningen, script by Luke Davies and Felix van Groeningen, based on books by David Sheff and Nic Sheff. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:00

“The Nursery Man” is a period piece about a house haunted by somebody glimpsed by the grownups, but whom the children have every reason to fear.

So no, we’re not going to be disappointed that this isn’t garden variety horror, no “Lawnmower Man” sequel here. No firm release date, but given how malnourished this looks (decent costumes and setting, pedestrian cell-phone camera lighting, little known cast), we will see if a studio decides it merits unleashing.

Sure, it’s got food. Lots of it. It’s postcard pretty rural Italy, after all. Even homophobes have to eat.

Seems dated, by US standards. But “coming out” in Catholic-Berlusconi Italy was always going to be dicy.

“My Big Gay Italian Wedding” earns release outside of Italy in Germany and elsewhere starting in January. We may have to wait for Netflix to see it in North America, but as there a few laughs in the trailer alone, maybe not.

Here’s how open “Hollywood’s Worst-Kept Secret” was.

Earlier in my career working for newspapers in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida, I’d hit several film festivals a year, including New York. I’d do junket weekends, chatting up the stars of this or that film — Miramax films included.

And among my friends in the film press, we’d openly joke about how Miramax, the studio run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, seemed to recruit their publicists from the same finishing school. Beautiful little clones in matching little black dresses.

Dealing with them constantly, you couldn’t help but get to know a few as friendly, helpful individuals — focused, sharp and ambitious. But when you didn’t see one you knew at New York after having seen her at Toronto, you learned not to ask after her twice. The looks of alarm and avoidance, the few I would chat with if they turned up doing PR for another studio giving hints about “Not an easy place to work” and “a bad place for WOMEN to work” told me all I needed to know.

But nooooo. Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Rene, Gwyneth and Damon et al could NEVER have known right?

Others have done TV exposes of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the birth of #MeToo and #TimesUp. But “The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst-Kept Secret” is the first feature documentary about it, a wide-ranging film that focuses mostly on Weinstein, but also on the shock waves that washed over everyone from Aziz Ansari and Billy Bush to Cosby, Spacey, Toback and Donald Trump.

It’s damning in its depiction of a culture “willing to look the other way so long as he was making a lot of people a lot of money.”

Brave victims from Ashley Judd (“He abused his power.”) on down the acting community’s pecking order speak out. Starlet Starr Rinaldi was warned, “Don’t be alone with Harvey,” but there were always people who could make that happen.

Former employees detail the enabling that went on — assistants cajoling women into compromising situations, CAA and other talent agencies “pimping” starlets for The Harvey Treatment.

Here’s footage of Uma Thurman, spitting out the words, “When I’ve spoken, in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting for when I’m less angry. When I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”

Journalists like Ken Auletta talk about the “monster” reputation Weinstein wore, which few took seriously due to the endless parade of awards season “I’d like to thank Harvey Weinstein” speeches.

Actresses like Katherine Kendall note the damage he could do to a woman’s career (Hers and Judd’s are good examples.). Others, like Dominique Huett, tearfully confess, “If I hadn’t been in a vulnerable career space…I needed a break.”

That gives filmmaker Barry Avrich, a Canadian director whose “Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project” (2011) tells you how long he and his team have been gathering expertise on their subject, his chance to widen the scope of “The Reckoning.”

Hollywood scandal monger Kenneth Anger gives the history of “The First Casting Couch.” “Keystone Cops” producer Mack Sennett had it. Emma Thompson recounts the business’s “history of harassment and bullying and interference,” what her mother in a more delicate age referred to as “pestering.”

“Reckoning” talks to lawyers, psychologists and others about the nature of this abuse and harassment. Its effect is always the same — traumatized and “shamed” women, some of them (in Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly’s cases) paid off. Many were not.

Tippi Hedren (“The Birds”) quotes what her harasser, Alfred Hitchcock, threatened her with. “He said ‘I’ll ruin your career.’ And he did.”

The film goes into graphic descriptions of Weinstein’s crimes, and those of Louis C.K. and James Toback. Cosby is merely shown, along with Casey Affleck, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, all tossed together in the same parade of harassers and worse.

Dylan Farrow recounts her dismay at how #MeToo blew up and yet here’s Kate Winslet, still working with Woody Allen. Here’s Diane Keaton defending “my friend.” Dylan is the Mia Farrow daughter who accused Allen of molesting her as a child.

Men were bullied, cursed and threatened and director George Hickenlooper recounts, in almost amusing detail, the profane threats Weinstein hurled at him over his direction and editing of “Factory Girl,” about Edie Sedgwick. Weinstein wanted “the sex scene” re-shot, and gave explicit instructions about what he wanted to see. Any doubts you have that lurid sex scenes and strip club moments in movies are sops to pervy producers vanish with this account.

Two stand-out take-aways from “The Reckoning” stick with me. Most of the Miramax and Weinstein Co. “enablers” get off without being named. But the role of the NDA, the “Non-Disclosure Agreement,” in fostering this climate of unending abuse, is exposed. As is its most avid advocate, “wronged woman” attorney Gloria Allred. It’s implied that she prolonged this crime spree by insisting her clients settle, take a payoff and keep quiet.

She was colluding in “silencing women,” putting their lives and careers “under a cloud of shame.”

And then there’s Dr. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist who regularly appeared on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly until she accused him of gross, threatening, persistent and unwelcome sexual come-ons. She’s a psychologist and proceeds, as a victim with FIRST HAND knowledge, to analyze why men “with some narcissistic injury” from their youth expose themselves to women. Shame triggers arousal in a Weinstein, O’Reilly or Louis C.K.

It’s the most damning interview moment in a movie that has plenty of dramatic moments — that infamous Howard Stern/Weinstein interview, the O.J.-like helicopter chase of Weinstein fleeing (by private jet and Escalade) to “sex addiction rehab” in Arizona.

Journalist Kim Masters, editor at large at The Hollywood Reporter, recalls Weinstein trying to manage the decades of rumors by baiting and confronting her in an interview, provoking her to blurt out “I’ve heard you rape women.”

Rose McGowan raises a fist and actress Melissa Sagemiller (“Get Over It”) details her variation of a story we’ve heard repeated — the proffered ride, private jet flight, “let me walk you to the subway” — scores of times, Weinstein’s piggishly predictable MO.

Leonard Cohen croons “Everybody Knows” on the soundtrack. And Meryl Streep defends herself against #MerylKnew charges.

No, it wasn’t up to any single individual (Bob Weinstein or later Michael Eisner, maybe) to expose and stop this. But how could she, them or any of us, not know?

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual content criminal sexual behavior described

Cast:Ken Auletta, Jesse Berdinka, David Carr, Joan Collins, Alan Dershowitz, George Hickenlooper

Credits:Directed by Barry Avrich, script by Barry Avrich, Melissa Hood, Michèle Hozer. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:18

Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse play the star-crossed lovers fighting for their lives against a deadly disease, and fighting for the chance at love — in spite of the medical warnings.

“Five Feet Apart” looks like a genuine romantic weeper, and the trailer suggests it just might work. March 22 is when it opens.

A movie like “In a Relationship” kind of sits there, a bit thin on the entertainment side,  and sends us back to the basics, consulting with the hard and fast rules for a romantic comedy.

Shakespeare invented them, but he never patented that invention, so here they are.

If possible, the lovers must “meet cute.” 

There must be love, love that we root for and love interrupted. The lovers must face obstacles.

Friends must interfere, buck up and/or advise the lovers and if at all possible find love themselves.

The banter is best when it’s biting and sarcastic, the best “obstacle” to our couple.

“In a Relationship” breaks many of these rules, skipping the “meet cute” and never for an instant letting us think writer-director Sam Boyd is the New Bard when it comes to sparkling dialogue.

But it has a lived-in feel, a reality about it that despite the pretty young things of the cast skipping from NYC to LA, makes it feel authentic. This is how real people connect, misconnect, fight and bargain. And that’s almost enough.

Emma Roberts, most recently in “American Horror Story,” is Hallie, a photographer’s assistant five years into her romance with Owen (Michael Angarano, “I’m Dying Up Here”).

“It’s been THREE years,” Owen, a video editor, counters.

A rise in his rent causes her to blurt out “Let’s move in together,” and Owen? He’s in that “No so fast, dear” place. They’ve settled into the foreplay turns into “Let’s watch a movie” stage of the relationship. At least they can agree on the first time “we hung out,” way back in their East (Greenwich) Village youth.

That’s where Owen’s best bud, Matt (Patrick Gibson of Netflix’s “The OA”) first met “Hallie’s hot cousin,” Willa, played by the latest beauty of the clan Hemingway (Dree Hemingway of “While We’re Young”). Willa is on her way to LA.

Matt’s been a bit obsessed, and is all set to renew their acquaintance. But when they all get together at a party, Willa — being unutterably gorgeous and aloof, has no memory of meeting Matt.

Hallie photographs the wrong guy, and Owen shifts from “I miss my FREEDOM” and “maybe we should cool it” to jealous rage in a heartbeat. It all comes to pieces so fast.

Matt? Trusting, needy and just gentlemanly enough to stand out, is REALLY into Willa and willing to push past his tentative nerdy earnestness to take a chance, he goes from “Sorry, I don’t recall” to sharing the coolest Uber in LA to actually having a shot with his dream date.

If you can call it a date.

I like the way Hallie and Owen fight. It’s about something, about differing visions of their future, the fact that she has one and he doesn’t. They know which buttons to push.

“So you just flat out don’t want to live with me?

“I’m not ready to settle down.”

“Stop pretending you care about something just so you can be mad about it!”

Willa loses her aloof cool after a kiss, and even a seduction-in-the-making in Matt’s teenage room in his parents’ house doesn’t blow the mood.

“I’m sorry about my twin bed.”

I know, she says. “I feel like a pedophile.”

“In a Relationship” then settles into dull and contrived — guys over-sharing everything, Owen diving into Mexican junk food and casual hook-ups (failed hook-ups as well), Hallie thrown together with a handsome actor (Jay Ellis) from an HBO sci-fi show she used to watch with Owen, and with others.

Drinking games, skinny dipping, casual flings and molly figure into their disconnected-but-still-connected relationship.

“I’m just happy to be here” needy/clingy Matt starts to realize his romantic dream isn’t all he wishes for. His big romantic gestures (She’s REALLY into the O.J. case, so he books her onto an O.J. murder tour) aren’t getting the reactions he expects.

“She’s like a cat that keeps asking you to pet it. And when you do, she just runs away.”

Random moments of dialogue register; an unhappy woman asking her female friends “Can we look at pictures of sushi on Yelp?” as a coping mechanism, Hallie blurting out “I feel like when you meet someone you know if you’re going to love them!” and Owen shutting down any uncomfortable conversation with “What did we say about fast-talking in the morning?”

To the writer-director’s credit, Willa isn’t painted as a generic cruel beauty. She’s conflicted, drawn to men who aren’t like the puppydog Matt seems to be.

“Am I Felicity?”

“Willa, we’re all Felicity.”

Every character has an arc, which is nice. But they’re all under-developed. Hinting that Hallie has ongoing anxiety issues that border on phobias, suggesting Owen has ambitions beyond editing wedding videos, the shifting dynamic of Willa and Matt’s affair are all interesting enough to pursue or develop without adding to the tight running time.

Too much of what is here feels like filler, not advancing the plot or our understanding of the characters as this cast performs them, not sparkling enough to lift the rom-com beyond “adequate.”

And I feel especially cheated as “In a Relationship” fails to answer that age-old question about Emma Roberts in the movies.

When will she stop taking eye makeup tips from Johnny Depp?

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Emma Roberts, Michael Angarano, Dree Hemingway, Patrick Gibson, Jay Ellis

Credits: Written and directed by Sam Boyd. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:32

Clocking in at over two hours, a “troubled” production, a director under a #MeToo cloud, a movie that managed mixed reviews, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was still supposed to pull in $38-40 million on its opening weekend.

Because, well, who doesn’t love Queen? God save them and all that.

But Fox took this brand to the house playing to the film’s crowd pleasing strengths. A $50 million weekend, so sayeth the bean counters. It’s official.

Well, take that with a grain of salt, as that nice round figure it mimicked by the safe $20 million the very pricey “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is estimated to have earned (by midnight Sunday, so it’s a guess), and $14 million for Tyler Perry’s Tiffany Haddish flop, “Nobody’s Fool.”

Amazon’s supposed Oscar contender “Beautiful Boy” more than doubled its screens and still didn’t crack the top ten.

Similarly, Amazon’s “Suspira” opened in slightly more limited release and failed to register with audiences. Check out the per screen numbers. They couldn’t market merlot to a wino, as I like to say.

“Mid90s” and “First Man” and “Night School” fell out of the top ten.

“Boy Erased” did stunning per-screen numbers in extremely limited release. Look for that Oscar contender in much of the country Nov. 9 and 16.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me” opened much wider, had decent per screen numbers but still seems destined to not attract widespread attention, despite its darkly funny turns by Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant. If that one hits 800 screens, it should do well.

“Walk a mile in my shoes,” the old saying and song go. “Everybody’s dealing with something” is a similar, more modern plea for compassion and empathy.

Because who among us could deal with the burdens of Jheri Jones of Pearl, Mississippi?

“The Joneses: Every Family Has a Story to Tell,” lists them.

Jheri is 74 in the film and lives in a double wide in a trailer park on the buckle of America’s Red State poverty belt. She shares it with two adult sons, one diagnosed special needs, the other pushing 40 and depressed about a life that has amounted to little that he can count as a contribution.

She has a third son in an assisted living facility, and a fourth who has teenage kids who do not know grandma’s secret.

Grandma used to be Grandpa. Jheri used to be Jerry, married Doris and had four kids. In 1980, they divorced and he began his transition.

All this in that oasis of tolerance and open-mindedness that America knows is  Mississippi.

Moby Longinotto’s film gets close to Jheri, and by extension her family, and captures a flamboyant free spirit who salsa dances all by herself, speaks frankly about her sexual history and hints at the murderous atmosphere she came out in and “the closed, segregated Mississippi” where she was raised — a place where it was “a scary time to be different.”

She says grace before every meal, never misses a Sunday at Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church and talks about her difficulties, over the decades, “looking for a good, solid relationship…How far do you go before telling them about your situation?”

As upbeat and refreshingly blunt as Jheri is, “The Joneses” is more broadly a depressing portrait of Dead End America, far removed from big, sophisticated cities. Three of her four sons have mental issues, and the one who is “only” depressed — Trevor — cannot win the argument with her that her dumping the family and changing her gender (operations and all), her ego and vanity, weren’t easy to grow up in.

“I TRY to understand you,” Trevor says. “THIS is why we don’t grow as a family.”

There is collateral damage for being forced to live a lie, and this is never more obvious than when preening, dishing Jheri criticizes her late wife for the depression, anger and weight gain that led her premature death — as if Jheri had nothing to do with any of that.

“The Joneses” is like a Southern Gothic reality TV version of “Baskets” — dysfunction and hardship all around, lost souls (save for married, runs-his-own-business Wade), and a transgender woman at the vortex of it all.

“She’s been there,” Wade declares. “Sometimes, that means more than anything.”

Once she reconnected with her kids, Jheri went full nurture — housing two, visiting the one in the home and doing the books (she has been a teacher, accountant and other professions over her working life) for the third.

Jheri may kvetch about “My nerves” (the older Southern lady’s favorite complaint), but she keeps looking on the sunny side, modeling her 74 year old post-transition bod in a swimsuit, singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

The film could use more of Jheri’s struggle, the years when the wrong bar pickup could end in “murder,” to take some of the edge off her narcissism. That ceases being cute after about twenty minutes.

Her family is pretty acceptant in the film’s opening, more so by the final credits. How’s she taken by her church? Her neighbors? Where are her friends?

It’s as in Longinotto chose to leave those queries out, because she and we probably figure we know the answers. But maybe we don’t.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, sexual subject matter

Cast: Jheri Jones, Wade Jones, Brad Jones, Trevor Jones, Trent Jones,

Credits:Directed by Moby Longinotto . A Bunny Lake release.

Running time: 1:20

We all have our favorite character actors, right?

One of mine — I have many — is Man Mountain of the Great White North Ron Perlman, of “Quest for Fire,” “Hellboy” and too many too indie and B-movies to number.

He’s the title character in “Asher,” yet another hitman wants to retire thriller in the droll and dramatic vein.

Famke Janssen is the love interest, Peter Facinelli the younger guy in “the life,” and Oscar winner Richard Dreyfus reaches for another Eastern European accent as the boss who needs this one last job, you know, “contracted.”

“Asher” opens on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7.

“Weightless” is a downbeat, off-his-meds dip into magical realism, a somber drama about a guy wholly unfit to be a full time father put in charge of the son he’d never met.

It won’t be to every taste, but director Jaron Albertin’s cryptic, quiet and intimately suspenseful film paints a vivid portrait of a broken life trapped in denial and the fragile child we fear for the moment “Dad” gets the call from his ex sister-in-law —
“Your boy. Not my responsibility, he’s yours.”

Alessandro Nivola (“American Hustle,” “A Most Violent Year”) is Joel, and his introduction is as mysterious as it is alarming. He’s stumbling out of a lake in upstate New York, punching rocks on the shoreline in an outburst of impotent rage.

He drives trucks and bulldozers at the Fulton County dump. He’s just set up housekeeping, a dump that he puts a TV and mattress into, that his been-around-and-everybody-knows-it girlfriend Janeece (Julianne Nicholson, a marvel) adds a goldfish to.

He’s settled into a working class life of pool hall bars, blue collar jobs, Walmart shopping and low expectations.

Then Joel gets the call. His ex-wife Sarah disappeared — ran off. Her sister (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) is done with the kid. Will (Eli Haley) is obese, diabetic and all-but-mute. Mom running off was a trauma he’s never overcome, and his shrewish aunt has had enough.

Joel has been ignoring the meds and the counsel of his doctor (K. Todd Freeman, quite good), and you can see the doctor’s “A ten year old boy needs looking after” advice ignored as well.

Joel’s boss, played by Johnny Knoxville in a compact, compassionate and earthy turn, gently hits this “special” employee with simple, practical questions which the spacey Joel never considered. “He in school? Got his medical records?”

Joel has childlike qualities himself. He’s responsible enough to show up at work on time every day and do his job, utterly clueless about childcare, disconnected and knowing any better. We fear for the kid and seethe at Joel’s idiotic response to having a boy under his roof.

Will? He’s used to solitude, envisions himself through the eyes of a bird he spies over the dump, peering down at them and the ruin and unspoken tragedy and pain all around them. He sits with a bag over his head, fondles his Littlest Pet Shop fish toys and watches the same video, over and over again.

That video will take your breath away and break your heart.

Nicholson (“I, Tonya,” “Black Mass”) gives Janeece this brittle but warm bottom line bluntness and nurturing instinct that brooks no nonsense, doesn’t wait for explanations and reaches out to the kid before Joel can alibi his way out of not having met a child he’s known about since birth.

“You’ve been carrying around his name, and you wouldn’t even visit him?”

“Weightless” gives us glimpses of hope as we realize Will can talk and will — but only to peers, at first. Carla (Phoebe Young) is the only neighbor kid in redneck bullytown to be nice to him.

Nivola and the screenplay give us hints of Joel’s issues, his personal pain. There’s impulse control and bottled up rage (he collects old pop bottles he finds at the dump), drifting through the oblivion inside his head, avoiding any contact that could put him in conflict.

Guys like that, conflict comes to them.

Albertin keeps the camera close on his stars and lets them speak volumes with their eyes. A tearful breakup is seen, not heard, through a kitchen window, a child teeters on the brink of having one life-altering or ending accident while his dad aimlessly drifts here or is distracted or waylaid by a passersby there.

Frankly, Albertin, whose story Enda Walsh turned into a script, needs to tell us more, put more of what’s going on in the open where it’s easily understood.

But the mystery, the drift of “Weightless” still makes for a captivating indie film experience, tension without melodrama, mistakes with consequences, a world where people are facing the future and accepting responsibility even as Joel, and his chip off the old block kid, live in denial of it.

MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Alessandro Nivola, Julianne Nicholson, Johnny Knoxville,Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Meryl Jones Williams, Phoebe Young

Credits:Directed by Jaron Albertin, script by Enda Walsh. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:37