I’m not certain there could be room for anything but disgust whether you’re a stranger, a family member, or an old friend reading the news. The film is an experience that’s not easily shaken, but it’s not the ghastliness of the story that grabs hold of you and won’t let go - it’s the soul-crushing sadness.When someone kills seventeen people over a thirteen-year span with words like necrophilia and cannibalism circling each murder, sympathy for the predator - not his prey - is neither the first nor hundredth emotion that should come to anyone’s mind. Meyers ends the movie on a chilling note, showing us the moment when a young man steers the toxic mess of his life onto a path that can only be called evil. In its portrayal of Jeff’s agonies, it can be excruciating. In its fusion of craft and narrative, My Friend Dahmer is exquisite. He tries hanging out with an unhinged pot dealer (Miles Robbins), but finds his brand of violence unacceptable. Wolff conveys Derf’s repulsion/admiration toward Jeff with a casual mix of charm, sincerity and offhand cruelty, while Lynch’s contained performance signals that Jeff knows he’s not truly accepted as one of the gang. In what’s perhaps the film’s sole off-key note, Derf’s use of the word “disrupt” to describe the mission of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club feels anachronistic, but his too-cool-for-the-mainstream sentiment is clear. Wolff’s aspiring cartoonist Derf Backderf (who would begin writing his graphic novel after Dahmer’s 1991 arrest) becomes Jeff’s most ardent fan, working him into enough of his drawings to inspire another student (Katie Stottlemire) to ask if Jeff is his muse. Taking his audacious shtick for a form of insolent performance art, an appreciative trio of self-aware nerds (Alex Wolff, Tommy Nelson, Harrison Holzer - all excellent) invite him into their outsider fold, several rungs up from his status as an untouchable. But as if understanding that he’ll only ever be seen for the wrong reasons, he invents a new way for a nonentity in the high school hierarchy to be noticed: He stages sudden “ spaz” routines in the school hallways, throwing fits like someone in the grips of a grand mal seizure. Jeff becomes as obsessed with a male jogger (Vincent Kartheiser) as he is with the innards of mammals, and his conflated urges might have left him ever more isolated in his shame. Amid the fever pitch of home life and the abuse of bullies at school, Jeff is becoming aware of his attraction to men, at a time when homosexuality is still largely closeted, especially in Middle American places like the Dahmers‘ suburban Ohio. Though the backyard-shed “lab” where Jeff dissolves roadkill in jars of acid is unsettling to Dad, little brother Dave (Liam Koeth) and neighborhood kids, nobody sees the slow, tormenting dissolve that’s going on within the strange teen. Recognizing something of himself in his son’s social awkwardness, he tries to direct him toward team sports and other supposed roads to fitting in. Joyce Dahmer is played to nerve-jangling perfection by Anne Heche, while Dallas Roberts, as Jeff’s chemist father, is a mixture of clumsy sincerity and self-disappointment. Dahmer’s miswired brain circuitry makes him alone to begin with, and on top of that he’s doing what he can to shut out the everyday domestic horror of his parents’ disintegrating marriage and his mother’s mental illness - potently externalized in Jennifer Klide’s production design for the Dahmer home. Without spelling it out, Meyers and his collaborators tap into the particular historical vein that found teens caught between the afterglow (or fallout) of the countercultural movement and the arrival of Reagan’s America.Īt home and at school, teens of the era were, to a significant degree, on their own, a reality that’s dramatized to haunting effect. Its clear-eyed view of the period is an unnerving alternative to the warm nostalgia that characterizes many movie depictions of the late ‘ 70s. The film is set in 1977-78, Dahmer’s senior year in high school. FilmRise Secures $50 Million in New Financing
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