One thumb up: Lou Pucci in Thumbsucker

The fever surrounding Mike Mills' Thumbsucker has achieved a kind of cultural dewpoint. The ubiquity of its New York advertising campaign has us spotting its succession of taglines on everything from the Web to Gotham's construction barriers. Its Sundance momentum only accelerated since January, the beneficiary of added good timing in the wake of co-star Vince Vaughn's $200-million summer with Wedding Crashers. As far as the actual film goes, the direction is assured and the performances excel—Tilda Swinton's and Vincent D'Onofrio's dizzyingly so.

So all that having been said, and with Sony Classics' dogged insistence on making rain, why isn't Thumbsucker a better movie? Why does the end product of Mills and Co.'s five-year odyssey from author Walter Kirn's page to one of the season's indie film events feel hollow, even pretentious? How can an assemblage of outstanding actors firing on all cylinders for a director and cinematographer who obviously love them equal less than the sum of their parts?

The quick answer is that those parts exist as that and little else; as adapted by Mills, Kirn's story buckles under the weight of the performers' fierce logic and independence. Portraying essentially dependent characters, Swinton, D'Onofrio, Vaughn and Sundance it-boy Lou Pucci overextend the poignancy accompanying the narrative about a teenager (Pucci) reconciling love, family and potential against his deep insecurity—represented, in this case, by his tendency to suck his thumb under stress. But in these performers' presence, the symbol—and virtually everything stemming from it plays like the ironic goof that you just know Mills tried everything to avoid.

"Well, that's great," Mills said recently when The Reeler asked him about this. "My whole key thing was the performances. If the performances are good, if the performances feel real, if the performances are getting you somewhere with the people—like if they're surprised by what they're doing and you're filming that—then it will all be worthwhile. That will be the glue that holds it all together. I always thought of it like inside out: Like if that part is right, then the story will come across—the scenes will come across. If that part is thin or predictable or clichéd, then the story will be thin, and the themes will be thin and predictable."

I mean, he is right in a way: Great performances are a wonderful "problem" to have, and Pucci inhabits 17-year-old Justin as the prototype of 21st century ennui, intelligence and longing. Growing up in a pine-shrouded suburb of Oregon, Justin shares a home with his parents—who insist he refer to them by their first names, lest "Mom" and "Dad" remind them they are aging—and his adversarial younger brother. Justin's thumbsucking lapses alienate his embarrassed ex-jock father Mike (D'Onofrio) but barely register with his mother Audrey (Swinton), a nurse apparently more interested in meeting her favorite TV star than in repealing her son's only comfort.

And while Justin's home life could not appropriately be classified as a bad one, he struggles at school as an inattentive loner. His thumbsucking undermines a burgeoning relationship with his debate club teammate Rebecca (Kelli Garner), while his coach, Mr. Geary (Vaughn), grows intolerant of his poor performance. Justin explores a series of correctives, including the counsel of a mystic orthodontist (a perfectly cast Keanu Reeves, slouched on the tipping point between authority and surrender) and, eventually, the chemical fusion of Ritalin. An accomplished short film and video maker, Mills applies a nicely honed concision to Justin's almost immediate rehabilitation; that Mills' hero can now read Moby Dick in one sitting does not seem like such a misplaced conceit, nor does his rapid ascendance to debate team triumph. Justin is not long for his new focus, however, as the scale of his recovery proportionately expands the scope of his vulnerability. "You're very good at thinking things are stupid," Audrey tells her son early in the film—a perception that deepens in meaning long before Geary's acknowledgement that in Justin, he has "created a monster."

Nevertheless, by the time Justin's moral, emotional and sexual exploitation is revealed, the audience has long since resigned itself to another quirky glimpse into America's suburban morass. For their parts, Mills loathes the idea of "quirkiness" ("It's like saying 'fag,' " he told me, and we all know how Mills feels about homophobia), and Pucci stresses that everyone involved in Thumbsucker sought to avoid a routine criticism of the suburb."This was such a more realistic look at it," he told The Reeler. "This was just a more truthful look at it, without kind of judging it, actually. Which was really the thing I am now seeing (in how) Mills did such a good job with the movie. He didn't judge anything or anybody."

Thumbsucker filmmaker Mike Mills does not judge you

Mills later drove the point home. "The last thing I wanted to do was pick on people from the suburbs, or say because you live in the suburbs, you made some delusional decision in your life and you're left there," he said. "I think that everybody has a dream of home, and living in SoHo and wearing a beret and being an artist is just as much of an illusion as living in suburbia. And I was trying really hard not to be arch with my use of suburbia.

"But it's funny," Mills added. "I don't blame people. It's very hackneyed turf in American filmmaking right now. It's where this story happened, it's where this film took place, and I'm interested in suburbia. But in this present moment in time, it is very hackneyed stuff. It’s me, it's what I am interested in, but it's a moment in time where it's not the best, most original thing to talk about. But it's not going to stop me from talking about it."

Which is fine by me, but only reinforces Thumbsucker's refusal to judge its suburban milieu as just a different kind of platitude—one that would otherwise hardly bother me at all in the company of such stirring performances. But Mills' ethos experiences an obvious ideological clash with Kirn's source material, about which the author is even less apologetic (at least according to the press materials):

"The suburbs are a land of appearances," says novelist Walter Kirn. "They're ruled by the need to put on a good show for the boss, the church, the neighbors. And yet people suffer and have anxieties in the same way that they do everywhere. And it's that mismatch between the surface and the depths that really make them interesting and sort of heartbreaking places."

This dissonance creeps into every seam of the story, marooning Mills' and his amazing cast in the throes of a rigorous emotional exercise. D'Onofrio and Swinton work as brilliantly as ever in their dance of reticence and regret, their characters restraining series of outbursts that the viewer can sense poking at the backs of their lips. Pucci owns Justin's wounded ambition and sensitivity without imploding under the teen torment that claims his paramour. Mills and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay thrive on the characters' nuances, charging Swinton's half-smiles and Garner's immense gaze in particular with a rich warmth and resonance that helps invalidate the rest of the film's flagging intellectual honesty.

So yeah, Thumbsucker limps, severely at times, as opposed to the mad sprint its distributor has hyped since mid-August. Nevertheless, it obtains a charm and efficiency—however clinical its appeal—that defies its narrative's dodgy mechanics. And when you read the Sony Classics ad that asserts, "I really like that the film sucked," maybe you should bow your head and give a moment of thanks for some truth in all that advertising. I mean, it does kind of suck, but not for lack of trying—and trying pretty goddamned hard.