Rocket Science

Cast: Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Vincent Piazza, Nicholas D'Agosto, Aaron Yoo, Margo Martindale, Josh Kay, Steve Park, Denis O'Hare, Lisbeth Bartlett
Language: English
Director: Jeff Blitz
Producer: Effie T. Brown, Sean Welch
Camera: Jo Willems
Story: Jeff Blitz
Screenplay: Jeff Blitz
Music: Eef Barzelay
Distribution: Picturehouse
Year: 2007

Jeffrey Blitz’s tender but hardheaded “Rocket Science” plumbs the tormented consciousness of Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson), a fragile teenager with a paralyzing speech impediment that leaves him unable even to order lunch in his high school cafeteria. As he stands there desperately trying to articulate the words racing through his head (will it be pizza or fish?), you feel his excruciating humiliation.

Hal’s sense of helplessness and frustration is a metaphor for the insecurity and confusion felt by every sensitive soul trapped inside the bubble of adolescence. “Rocket Science” belongs to the genre of independent films, now a Sundance cliché, that contemplates the world from within that bubble. At the high end are movies like “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Rushmore.” Somewhat lower are movies like “The Chumscrubber” that are barely noticed.

This is a genre that insists (often annoyingly) on flaunting a supposedly rarefied sensibility. Your affection for “Rocket Science” will depend on the depth of your identification with Hal’s angst and the degree to which you regard high school as the ultimate microcosm of American life.

By any measure Hal is a supernerd. That means he has no compensatory skills. He may or may not be brilliant, but his potential is still locked inside his head. Mr. Blitz sympathizes with him unconditionally, and Mr. Thompson delivers a performance that is all the more appealing for his refusal to make Hal overtly self-pitying.

With “Rocket Science” Mr. Blitz makes a promising transition into feature films after his popular, charming documentary, “Spellbound.” Both films share an openhearted but unsentimental vision of America as a land of multicultural opportunity. In both films there is no such thing as normal; everybody is riddled with quirks.

The story’s cruel joke is that Hal, of all unlikely people, finds himself aggressively recruited by Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), a smart, pretty, manipulative girl, to join the debate team. Ginny believes that if she drills Hal hard enough, he can conquer his speech impediment, although there is no specific evidence to support her intuition.

A brilliant debater, Ginny is also a virtuoso practitioner of an exercise called spreading, in which an argument is compressed into a 10-second rapid-fire delivery that makes the breakneck tongue-twisting list of Russian composers’ names in the Danny Kaye show-tune rap “Tchaikovsky” sound dawdling.

From the moment Ginny enters Hal’s life, he is smitten. Because the movie views her through his besotted eyes, it is never clear to what extent he is her personal cause and to what extent he is just a plaything. Their relationship, which begins promisingly and culminates in a passionate kiss, sours as Hal repeatedly fails in his debate trials. As she withdraws and changes schools, he desperately tries to contact her and repeatedly visits her home, where he receives a chilly reception.

Hal’s own home is splintered. Early in the movie his mother (Lisbeth Bartlett) kicks his cheating father (Denis O’Hare) out of the house in a fury. She takes up with the Korean-American father (Stephen Park) of one of Hal’s classmates (Aaron Yoo) until that relationship also ends in an explosion. Hal’s bullying, thieving older brother (Vincent Piazza) delights in torturing him.

The closest thing to a mentor Hal finds is Ginny’s slick former debate partner, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto), whose high school stardom ends when he abruptly and mysteriously freezes during a debate. Coached by Ben, who encourages him to sing his debating points (to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) instead of speaking them, Hal makes a little progress.

The surest sign of the movie’s integrity is that it resists any temptation to build the story to a climactic debate. “Rocket Science” has more important things to do than to create a false “will he or won’t he succeed under pressure?” moment of truth. Mr. Blitz recognizes that adolescence, for all its agonies, is a phase of growing up, and that Hal, like most teenagers, somehow senses that he is more resilient than he imagines — that adolescence is a purgatory he will survive.

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