Movie Nation

“If Beale Street Could Talk” is a movie that aches.

There’s a romantic ache to the love affair at its heart, coupled with the pained despair of struggling against a racist system that has broken or bent generations that have run afoul of it.

Equal parts playful and sweet, dark and bitter, it froths over with with poetic theatricality of novelist, social critic and gay black man of the 1960s James Baldwin.

It’s the second legitimate Oscar contender from writer-director Barry Jenkins. This is his period-piece social commentary-as-romantic-melodrama follow-up to “Moonlight.” “Beale Street” illustrates the difference between a work of cultural significance in a cultural moment — “Black Panther,” for example — and a movie of cultural consequence.

“Beale Street” is one of the best films of 2018.

It’s the story of Tish and Fonnie (Kiki Layne and Stephan James) friends since childhood, growing up along Banks Street in Manhattan’s West Village. They grew up to know, trust and now — as she is 19 and he is 22 — love each other. They’re getting married.

But prison bars separate them as Tish brings Fonny (Alfonzo) this biggest news of their lives. She’s pregnant.

Flashbacks show us their gentle, gradual courtship and the fateful chain of events that have him railroaded into jail, a broke artisan and artist “forced to pay for proving” his innocence despite having both an alibi and geographic disconnection from the crime and the obvious prejudice of a cop with a grudge and a story full of holes.

And scenes set in the late ’60s present encompass Tish passing on the news to her parents, and to Fonny’s, and their struggles to free him from the maw of a system that even in James Baldwin’s time was ancient and established and geared towards mass incarceration of the black underclasses.

There’s not a lot of narrative drive to Jenkins’ film — just lovely, often languorous scenes reveling in Baldwin’s vibe and scored with Baldwin’s words.

The best of these are the warm moment when Tish, her sister (Teyonah Parris) and her mother (the formidable Regina King) break the news to her father. Joseph (Colman Domingo) has an easy, light manner which we’re sure will be tested by this pregnancy.

“Unbow your head, sisters!”

But Hennessy cognac, Mom’s charm and his utter devotion to his daughter upend expectations. When he tells Fonny’s father (Michael Beach), “You and me? We’bout to go out and get drunk,” their shared delight will bring you to tears.

But the warmth of that get together is gutted by Fonny’s gloved church-going mother (Aunjanue Ellis), who clears her throat with “I always knew you’d be the destruction of my son,” with her daughters chiming in with blame, judgement and invocations of Jesus.

Fonny’s already in jail, remember, facing “the death that awaited the children of our age.” He may “love me too much,” Tish narrates, hinting at the chain of events that bring him to the attention of the wrong, bad cop. But his mother’s brittle fury and everyone else’s reaction to it puncture the romance even if she fails to totally deflate it.

Jenkins leans heavily on voice-over narration as a crutch, but having Baldwin’s words — an opening title explains his and his characters’ connection to “Beale Street,” and just what that represents to the story’s unfortunate timelessness, that was going to be hard to resist.

He parks his camera in tight close-ups, giving star treatment to a generally little known cast (King and Beach are joined by Dave Franco, as a sympathetic Jewish landlord). Newcomer Layne in particular lets us see the burdens and hurt that Tish must cover with reassurances of love and devotion in what should be the happiest days of her life.

James, who played Jesse Owens in “Race” and John Lewis in “Selma,” plays the tender romantic side of Fonny and his embittered, hopeless imprisoned state with great feeling and skill.

Jenkins treats the story and writing with a reverence that weighs on the picture and contributes to its sometimes tedious pacing. Omnipresent narration adds to the gravitas of the piece, but also tends to slow it down. Some of the language feels anachronistic, and some situations — symptoms of pregnancy — have a naivete that remind us that there were blind spots in the great Baldwin’s life experience.

But “If Beale Street Could Talk” washes over you even as it is getting under your skin. And Jenkins has made it into a movie that is a period piece that too easily seems modern, as timely as this week’s #BlackLivesMatter moment. For all the resilience Baldwin and Jenkins show us here, it is the poet Langston Hughes’ line about “a dream deferred” that comes most easily to mind.

Fifty years, and lives young and old are still battered and shortened by the same conditions Baldwin saw in his lifetime, prompting him to move to Europe the moment he could. Fortunately for posterity, he could still hear his father’s Beale Street talking to him and to the ages.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael Beach, Aunjanue Ellis, Dave Franco

Credits: Written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on the James Baldwin book. An Annapurna release.

Running time: 1:59

“Rockaway” is an sentimental coming-of-age melodrama, a personal tale of childhood in the ’90s that never gets the cutesie and edgy blend right.

It’s an ungainly hybrid — “Stand by Me” by way of  “The Sandlot” — without the writing or performers to pull off its imitation of either.

John (Maxwell Apple) grew up idolizing his big brother Anthony (Keidrich Sellati of “The Americans”). He was John’s protector, mentor and entertainer, the adult John (Frankie J. Alvarez) remembers in voice over narration.

And in that June of ’94, they both had “high hopes of a Knicks championship, and a plan to kill a man.”

The brothers live in Rockaway and worship the Knicks, one Knick in particular — undrafted, working class hero John Starks. Even at 8, John is all about the Starks wear — jerseys, the works.

Their dad (Wass Stevens of “House of Cards”) indulges him that, and brings home basketball trading cards after work. But let the kid tear a jersey playing, or dinner not be ready from waitress Mom (Marjan Neshat of “Sex and the City 2”) and somebody’s going to get hit.

“I promise I’ll never let him touch you or hurt you again,” young teen Anthony promises his brother. He entertains the younger kid with tales of “Mr. Dooh,” animated bits of the adventures of something that goes down the toilet.

And Anthony keeps John on task with “The Plan.” It involves tennis balls and a busted light bulb in the basement. It’s his plan for killing their brute of a father.

Interrupting their “You and Me Against the World” reverie is a gang of nearby kids they throw in with. From the friendly and unrealistically nurturing Billy (Harrison Wittmeyer) to the mouthy and delusional Sal (Colin Critchley), Brian (Tanner Flood) to tough runt Dom (James DiGiacomo), they’re the sort that summer bonding over baseball, The Knicks, pranks and girls are made of.

At least in the movies.

There’s little new under the sun in genre pictures of this type, even mash-ups that involve a plan to commit murder (under-planned and played down). Writer-director John J. Budion may have intended this to be a personal memoir with an edge — with violence, the threat of greater violence, profanity. But even the edgier stuff feels pre-ordained and pre-digested.

The details of “coming of age” don’t change — girly magazines, flirting, standing up to bullies — even if the music does (hip hop, mostly). The NBA Finals that year had the lads’ attention, but were infamously interrupted by the most widely televised low-speed Bronco chase in history.

For all its dark intent, “Rockaway” settles into something more like “The Sandlot” without the laughs — or James Earl Jones — even though a character references “Stand By Me” to invite that comparison. This isn’t on those films’ level in any regard.

The kids aren’t a sparking crowd, a nice moment here and there but to a one their performances are pretty flat. Even punch lines are delivered in a rote monotone that suggests child actors with no flair for comedy, or one needing another take or two (low budget films don’t have that luxury) to “nail it.”

“I’m a talker. Most of the time, I don’t need somebody to talk to.”

“Hey Mom, guess what we did today?”

“Made a three point shot?”

“Saw BOOBIES!”

Budoin ambitiously adds animation, fantasy sequences where Anthony becomes a superhero, Dom grows a cinderblock for a fist and John Starks morphs into a rocket who can take little John away from his troubled family.

The script isn’t scintillating, and the attempts at “edge” are overwhelmed by efforts to rub that edge off. But the casting — of the adults, only Stevens makes an impression — which could have rescued “Rockaway,” or at least rendered it more watchable, is where Budion’s film fizzles.

Set your tale in New York, shoot in a city with access to the cream of America’s acting classes, and this was all you could attract? Kids who can’t hit a punchline with a cinderblock for a fist?

That’s a sign from above, that you screenplay needs more polish before showing it to casting directors.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Keidrich Sellati, Maxwell Apple, James DiGiacomo, Marjan Neshat, Sophia Rose, Harrison Wittmeyer, Nolan Lyons, Colin Critchley, Tanner Flood, Wass Stevens

Credits: Written and directed by John J. Budion.  A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:24

Warners is still making mint by casting the right “Aquaman,” and humorously marketing the hell out of what most would consider a lesser hero of the DC Comic Book Universe.

Another $30 million+ this weekend? That’s what Deadline.com is saying after Friday’s boffo bank. Projections had been for a far more modest $25, maybe $26.

“Escape Room” managed to clear $17 million for Sony and in all likelihood, overtake Disney’s awards season blockbuster, “Mary Poppins Returns” (just under $17) for second place. Horror ALWAYS does well in the dead days of early January. Regular moviegoers have seen all the Oscar contenders, holdovers — and dive into the first thriller to get their attention.

And “Escape Room?” It’s not terrible, which always helps.

Michael Keaton’s “comeback” didn’t begin with “Birdman.” He was in “White Noise,” which made a lot of January noise and reintroduced him to fans and to the filmmakers who hired him afterwards. Producers were convinced he could still bring an audience.

“Spider-Verse” fades to fourth, “Mule” steadily closes in on $100 million, “Vice” rises to seventh.

No other “contender” is in the top ten, with “The Favourite” and “Marty Queen of Scots” sliding back into the second ten, and so on and so forth.

Golden Globes night is nigh, and “Vice” would be the only picture still in wide release (the animated “Ralph Breaks the Internet” shouldn’t win best animated feature, nor should “Spider-Verse,” but you never know) to benefit from a bounce from Hollywood’s Foreign Press endorsement. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is still making money though, and we hear the HFPA just loves Queen.

“Rhapsody” will need Globes/Oscar bounces to clear $200 million and catch its fellow “contender,” “A Star is Born.” 

He speaks in a dry, faintly effeminate monotone. And he speaks a lot. Guys who narrate their lives with an endless interior monologue do that.

Jobe “with an ‘e,'” “not the Biblical figure” lives and works in Manhattan, a 30something wraith on roller blades who makes deliveries — drugs, generally, “Molly” specifically — and ponders the nature of the universe — space, with its quasars and “all that s—”  because he needs to disconnect from his reality. He’s probably not using his product, in other words.

“It’s so mellow and trippy.  I’m actually making a sick manga about it.”

Sure he is.

“Jobe’z World” is dull and trippy day life in the life of a low-rent dealer, blading his wares to a collection of New York eccentrics — his regulars. It’s a decent enough idea, not the most novel or remotely as arty as this film treatment of it.

But it might have worked with a more compelling central character and a more fascinating performance of him by Jason Grisell.

The clients are given to pontificating, self-mythologizing and generally blowing Jobe’s mind on this rounds. There’s Ron (Stephen Payne), a not-quite-hermit survivalist, holed up in a bunker.

Jax (Jeremy O. Harris) is some kind of artist. I think. Rapper? His “flow” is something else. He’s seriously into his own head. Does he live with Jobe?

Zane (former child actor Owen Kline) is a would-be stand-up comic who just swapped his mother’s cookie jar for a fishing rod at the local thrift store. He’s imagining it as a “Southern lifestyle” thing, “Lake Woebegone” and all. He’s trying his luck in the East River.

Jobe needs to get through with work so he cook a meal for his mother, flying into JFK “literally any minute” now.

But the boss (Lindsay Burdge of “A Teacher”) has a special run for him to make. Jobe is to make a delivery to his idol, the lonely, faded screen star Royce (Theodore Bouloukos). And fanboy or not, Jobe’s wares make the bantering old man foam at the mouth and fade away. Well, the boss DID say the drugs he wanted were “worse than what killed MJ and Prince put together!”

Jobe finds himself fleeing the cops closing in on him, paparazzi who want his picture and his own demons, musing about “swarm intelligence” and facing his reckoning  — “the worst music ever made must be faced.”

There’s virtually nothing to this short, thin yet (barely) feature-length dramedy. A few funny lines wither in the dark and minutes upon minutes of screen time burn off space imagery and Jobe pondering the nature of it in his addled head.

Think of “Jobe’z World” as you doing your duty to a friend trying to kick and you’ll get  through it. Not without browsing through everything on your phone, though.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jason Grisell, Owen Kline, Stephen Payne, Jeremy O. Harris, Lindsay Burdge, Theodore Bouloukos, Sean Price Williams, Keith Poulson, Jason Giampietro and Kate Lyn Sheil

Credits: Written and directed by Michael M. Bilandic.  A Jobeworkz release.

Running time: 1:07

If you like British romances, with British puns and a pug, consider “Patrick,” which is being pitched as “Pug Actually” in the trailers.

“Patrick” stars Beattie Edmondson (“Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie”) as the lovelorn and somewhat overwhelmed new teacher Sarah, dumped and with only an undisciplined pup for company.

But dogs, as anybody knows, are opposite sex magnets.

Ed Skrein is the love interest, and Jennifer Sanders, Bernard Cribbins and assorted English roses populate the supporting cast.

“Patrick” will be on screens, big and small, Feb. 15. 

Another big weekend for Warners’ “Aquaman,” which should dominate the box office until “Glass” opens and Oscar nominations give “Mary Poppins Returns” a boost.

Box Office Mojo figures another $26 million will be added to the DC comic book hero’s bottom line.

“Aquaman” will be well over $250 by midnight Sunday, on its way to $300 million US gross.

“Vice” is hanging around the top ten, despite pushback from all the awards hounds hoping to bully “Black Panther” into the best picture conversation.

“Escape Room” is the only wide release rolling out this weekend, although a few awards contenders will add theaters. I saw “Escape Room” with a nearly sold-out audience Thursday night, and it should crack the top 6, if not the top 5. $12 million says BO Mojo. 

The movie itself? Meh. Not utterly awful, but the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

The most interesting picture opening this weekend is in limited release. If you’ve given up on Gerard Butler ever making another interesting choice as an actor, think again. He’s terrific in support of grizzled Scots character actor Peter Mullan in “The Vanishing,” a gritty mystery set among lighthouse keepers who went missing off Scotland early in the last century.

“Rust Creek” is middling, “State Like Sleep” has nothing to recommend it, “Communion” could be an Oscar nominated doc from Poland. 

“The craftsmanship in here  is just terrifying!” one wag declares in “Escape Room,” a line perhaps meant to flatter the director or the screenwriters.

He’s talking about the production design, the intricate clockwork puzzle “rooms” that six strangers must reason their way out of…or DIE. And he’s got a point. From the upside down pool hall/tap room to the cabin in the (frozen) woods to the waiting room that turns into a literal oven — “What the literal HELL” one character opines, the best line from a movie in 2019 (so far) — the places our sextet must get out of are clever conceits.

But the movie? Preposterous at the start, growing more ridiculous the longer it goes on. Because it does go on, well after the climax, blundering its way into explanations that are unexplainable, offering up the logic of the set-up when there is no logic, trying to gin up one last sliver of sympathy for a cast we don’t really have the chance to care about as they’re picked off in the best Edgar Allen Poe/Agatha Christie tradition.

A brief opening act lets us meet the shy but very smart Zoey (Taylor Russell of “Lost in Space”), the high-powered stock broker (Jay Ellis of TV’s “Insecure”) and embittered grocery strockroom drunk Ben (Logan Miller).

They all have holes in their lives, and they all get these elaborate puzzle boxes, invitations to a night in an escape room, where they meet the fire-scarred Army vet (Deborah Ann Woll), the veteran trucker (Tyler Labine, the least convincing in this cast) and the annoying escape-room/gaming nerd Danny (Nik Dodani), who enthusiastically explains the “real life video game” concept of escape rooms to the rest.

In an instant, they’re hurled into their first predicament. Only it’s too real, the consequences plainly too deadly. They collect clues and get out by the skin of their teeth. A couple fume, “Who DOES this?” They get what just happened. “Game Boy” buzzes “Talk about IMMERSIVE” and promises that “It’ll be fun from now on.”

If by “fun” he means death by baking, death by drowning, death by falling, death at the hands of fellow competitors.  Of course he’s wrong.

The assorted puzzles and clues — “You’ll go down in history” hints at what famous Christmas song? What might the presence of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” portend in a room that turns into “an Easy Bake Oven?” — are pallid.

We’ve already seen a prologue “three days earlier,” where one character who can’t read Latin scrambles to escape a “Star Wars” trash compactor room with “Acta est Fabula” (the story is done) carved on the walls.

But flashbacks give us the trauma that tested each game player earlier in life, even as parts of the game customized to play on each character’s worst fears.

Yes, the “Game Master” is omnipotent, even though his name isn’t “Jigsaw.”

None of the actors save for Woll have much in their character’s construction to make them memorable. Ellis has a nice, nasty Darwinian edge to play in dog-eat-dog Jason.

Nobody should expect much out of a film released in the tundra of the January cinema season, but I was willing to buy into this as a time-killer until the movie, like the games and game-master, stops playing by the rules it sets up.

And the year may be young, but Hollywood is going to be hard pressed to come up with a climax that is more anti-climactic than the many anti-climaxes that bring down the curtain on “Escape Room,” the first official dog of the new year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror/perilous action, violence, some suggestive material and language

Cast: Taylor Russell, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Logan Miller, Nik Dodani, Jay Ellis,

Credits: Directed by Adam Robitel, script by Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik. A Columbia release.

Running time: 1:40

“State Like Sleep” is a murder mystery without a lot of mystery to it, perhaps without even a “murder.”

It’s a moody but somewhat empty and frustrating character study set mostly in Belgium in the aftermath of a rising film star’s sad suicide.

Or was it? A suicide, I mean?

Stefan (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones”) has just landed his big “franchise” break. He liked his coke and heroin. He might have been cheating on his wife, which had him depressed because she was moving out. His childhood friend (Luke Evans) is being awfully cagey about the death. His mother (Hélène Cardona) see-saws between blaming his wife and venting about her need for his money.

And it took two shots from his gun to kill him.

That’s piques the curiosity of his widow, played with a poker-faced grief by Katherine Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Alien: Covenant” and “Logan Lucky.” Not right away, though. She has to work up the desire to care. As do we.

Katherine the widow is gutted, in denial. A year has passed and she’s thrown herself into her fashion photography, not dealing with Stefan’s death or the detritus of the life they had together.

Her mother (Mary Kay Place) has flown to Belgium to tidy this up with Stefan’s mother Anika. But she has “a minuscule stroke,” and that forces Katherine to return to the scene of the tragedy, to face the callous box of personal effects the police left for her, effects which include the gun that killed him.

Katherine must also face Anika’s rage — “This is YOUR mess!” — her own guilt, underlined by memories of the police interrogation, her certainty that she caused Stefan’s shame spiral. But she develops vague suspicions about the club owner “We were friends from childhood, you know” Emile (Evans) and the creepy American (Michael Shannon) who drinks, picks up women and hits on her in the hotel they’re both staying in and seems always under foot.

Writer-director Meredith Danluck (“The Ride”) waters down the tension, the grief, pretty much every emotion demanded here, by spreading her story between the fictive present — a year after Stefan’s death — and flashbacks to the day he died. Throw in Katherine’s trips to check on Belgian medicine’s treatment of her hospitalized (and comatose) mother, and you’ve got a story that never gets up enough steam to draw us in.

Katherine finds herself photographing the mysterious American, repulsed by him (he appears to be hiring hookers) and yet…determined to have sex with him.

Perhaps her Belgian bar pick-up who turns out to have a “thing” for baths, women in those baths, women covered in bubbles and women who need to have their hair scrubbed, is what sends her over the edge.

“Could you plizz make your hair vet?”

As Katherine asks questions edgy, mysterious Emile, Emile’s eager-to-please-anyone and everyone lady friend (Bo Martyn), Anika and the cops, she remembers her own actions the day of the death and recoils in horror from the police who won’t hear her new “theories” out.

“We all have a responsibility to protect his image.”

Considering the cocaine and heroin that gets passed around, Katherine’s half-hearted pursuit of “the REAL killer” in between snorts and bar pick-ups, “image” is not something anybody in Belgium would appear to be that concerned with.

Waterston doesn’t show us much here that makes us connect with the character. Shannon plays another version of his oft-evident off-putting intensity. Why wouldn’t she be frightened of him rather than attracted to him?

Evans gives Emile a bisexual bend that makes his the most interesting character, the most inscrutable, and the most disappointingly under-developed — after Wasterton’s Katherine.

I’d say writer-director Danluck’s story unravels entirely too easily, but that’s crediting her with “raveling” that she never quite gets around to.

“State Like Sleep” is how Katherine wanders through her story, and without more narrative drive, suspense and pace, that describes the viewer’s reaction to the the film as well, unfortunately.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, sexual situations, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Katherine Waterston, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Mary Kay Place, Hélène Cardona, Michiel Huisman

Credits: Written and directed by  Meredith Danluck.  An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:45

“Rust Creek” is a classic 85 minute thriller in a 105 minute wrapper, a visceral enough hillbilly meth cooks take a hostage tale whose many sins might be corrected by pacing.

It’s reasonably well thought-out and cast, but it’s slow. And with slack pacing come sloppy lapses in logic, delaying the inevitable in ways that aren’t helpful.

Hermione Corfield of “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” is Sawyer Scott, a Kentucky college coed we meet as she runs laps. She’s fit, she’s confident of this job interview she has in D.C. and perhaps too confident in her ancient Jeep Grand Cherokee and her phone’s GPS.

Because yelling at the phone in the middle of Appalachia never helps.

“This doesn’t make any sense. Just REROUTE me!”

Sawyer is lost, and the good ol’boys who offer “assistance” are a reminder that there’s no such thing as “good” ol’boys in the movies.

“These woods, they can be a crazy place,” offers the smarter brother (Micah Hauptman, oozing bad intentions). “You look upset.”

He gets her map out of her hands, and he’s sidling over to cut her off from her car door when she trots out her college campus #MeToo defense — “You’re starting to make me feel uncomfortable.” The boys (Daniel R. Hill is brother Buck) underestimate the college girl. She fights like a Fury, bloodies them both and even though she gets stabbed in the leg, makes her escape.

But then she’s into the woods with just the clothes on her back, her wits and some good old fashioned screenwriting “coincidences” to save her on this long Thanksgiving weekend.

She eludes capture, but her wound turns bad and the weather isn’t helping. Being tough, she waits a day or so before bursting into tears. It’s the blacking out that pays-off, though, as a mysterious stranger (Jay Paulson) comes along.

But this guy living in the rotting-out mobile home is no salvation. He’s a meth cooker, and like everybody else in this corner of Kentucky, he’s related to Sawyer’s tormentors. She proceeds to lose most of her assertive (not passive) edge and learn the chemistry of “cooking” as she hides from the siblings who keep showing up to check on the work.

An oddly-unconcerned sheriff (Sean O’Bryan) should be on the “abandoned vehicle” case, but isn’t. His deputy (Jeremy Glazer) isn’t the only one trying to get him interested.

And the plot thickens as the meth cooks, the “hostage” and her guard bond over “chemistry,” and we get a heaping helping of meth cooking instructions and chemical foreshadowing.

As in “this could blind you” and “just one spark and this blows up” and the like.

“Rust Creek” – the title is of course, the setting — settles into a torpid lack of urgency far too early to make this simple plot, with a four big action beats, fly along. Director Jen McGowan has a script with a few good fights and a handful of decent lines. But she dawdles and “Rust Creek” rusts, right before our eyes.

I was more interested in Sawyer showing off her self-sufficiency, peeling off her fake nails and getting down to the business of out hustling, out fighting or outsmarting her inbred pursuers.

“Figure this out! Everything’s going to be fine!”

But no, let’s have a man play her reluctant savior.

The object lessons in such movies — your cell phone won’t save you, etc. — are rung up, only to have the script lean heavily on the next coincidence, the next too-obvious means of escape.

We may instantly identify with the plucky coed, instantly fear and loathe the camo-loving locals and compliant law enforcement. But those are the only time-savers “Rust Creek” employs.

The violent payoffs are well-staged and edited, and the archetypes solid. But McGowan can’t force herself or her cast to just get on with what they know they must get on with. The “Creek” never quite dries up, but we never get to the rapids either.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some drug material

Cast: Hermione Corfield, Jay Paulson, Sean O’Bryan, Denise Dal Vera, Jeremy Glazer, Micah Hauptman

Credits: Directed by Jen McGowan, script by Julie Lipson. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:44

Ola runs young Nikodem through his Catholic Communion drills, prepping him a ceremony she knows this “on the spectrum” kid could mess up.

She goes through his backpack, weeding out everything “you don’t need.”

She calls and chews out the man of the house for being out at the pub. They need a bigger flat, so she’s the one who has to handle the town council paperwork.

And she badgers Magda, her mother, about coming to that Communion, about leaving the man she’s taken up with and had a baby with, and moving back in.

On a rare outing, she gets to feel “normal,” laughing and dancing with her peers. But when she comes home, she weeps at “this pigsty” she lives in, at her overwhelming responsibilities, at the dysfunction all around her.

Ola Kaczanowski is 14 years old.

Filmmaker Anna Zamecka‘s Oscar short list (Oscar eligible, a possible nominee) documentary “Communion” (“Komunia,” in Polish) is a study in resilience in the face of dysfunction, a profile of a child forced to grow up, be the adult, in a house where no one else will take the job.

Her mother Magda ran away, and when we see Ola’s dad, we understand. Maybe the drinking started after she left (Magda is younger and prettier. Maybe it was the final straw. He is an ineffectual lout, collecting public aid, shrugging off every decision, every household job, to Ola.

“Ola can’t take care of Nikodem on her own,” the unseen social worker barks at him (in Polish, with English subtitles). And yet here he is, drinking and smoking at the pub, ducking out on home life.

If that wasn’t enough, Magda’s son Nikodem, Ola’s 13 year-old brother, adds to the picture of “overwhelmed,” another excuse for Mom to run out.

Ola doesn’t have that option. She relentlessly drills the fidgety Nikodem on his Catholicism, teaches him to tie his shoes and battles his constant distraction. We meet him as he’s scolding himself for not putting on his pants properly. He stares at his fingernails — at home, in school and in church. He sees them as “claws.”

Ola chides him for his Communion notes — reading “No Mongols allowed” and “Jesus and the dinosaurs” — passages aloud, in mockery.

“You can’t do such things in religion class.” The kid is one joke-around on the church PA system away from blowing it. At least he’s very good at memorizing, which is what it takes to pass muster with the priest.

Ola lets us see the weight she carries, shrieking at her drunken father for somehow losing their TV, desperately badgering Madga to come home — making reasoned arguments, building her case, making living arrangement promises.

Zamecka’s all-access film means we see Ola’s desperation, and Magda’s resignation. Each one needs a break, and each is counting on the other to give it to her. Seeing Ola with a baby half-brother in her lap is just chilling.

These are the saddest moments of “Communion,” Ola’s tireless, adult efforts to get some sense of a “normal” childhood back, her grown-up-too-fast realization that it’s all come to naught.

Zamecka gives us a home movie glimpse of Ola’s own Communion, years before Magda left, when her life had more promise. Zamecka sprinkles in details — a post-ceremony meal, classes where the priest leads the kids in a “Magdalena Cha Cha Cha” song about Catholicism set to “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

“Communion” isn’t so much a coming-of-age story as a “My hard life begins in childhood” account of a smart, tough and responsible kid having to get tougher and smarter at a very early age. Watch Ola with her classmates, with her family. She’s been forced to be the adult, and that’s turning her into a leader.

That makes her a teen we worry for because we suspect that revisiting her in ten years she could go either way. Will she be worn down by life, with diminished expectations marking her 20s and the rest of her future? Or will she grow up to be a smart woman hardened in childhood for a life of leadership in a country where too many are resigned to sit back and let others do the heavy lifting? “Communion” cries out for a sequel — maybe of her own child’s Communion, decades in the future.

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol consumption, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ola and Nikodem Kaczanowski

Credits: Written and directed by Anna Zamecka.  An HBO Europe/Otter Studios/Wajda Studios/Polish Film Institute release

Running time:  1:12