WATCH THE TRAILER

PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/9/07)

Rocket Science director Jeffrey Blitz recently stood before an audience at the L.A. Film Festival and remarked how he believed the stutter he had growing up was "fate's way of putting me in my place" as the result of his great ambition. Funny how fate has a way of making amends.

As the follow-up to his acclaimed spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, Rocket Science is Blitz's first narrative film, and the result combines the director's immense skill with a scrupulous account of his attempts to overcome his speech impediment by joining his high-school debate team. His surrogate in the film is Hal Hefner (Thompson), the kind of student who doesn't seem to fit in anywhere. Too straitlaced to accept being the outsider and too self-aware to make friends, Hal easily falls prey to the type-A teen Ginny Ryerson, a member of the debate team who lures him to be her partner following a disgraceful showing at competition a year earlier. Ryerson is played by Anna Kendrick, an actress who shrewdly vacillates between the immaturity of not knowing how her actions will affect others and the killer instinct of a canny predator who would eat her own young. Naturally, she is not to be trusted, but when you're a 17-year-old kid in high school, blood is rushing elsewhere than the brain.

Blitz has said that he set Rocket Science in a "world full of love and sex," and, indeed, Hal also has to deal with the strange courtship of his divorced mother by a local judge, his young neighbor's musical parents who work through their marital difficulties by playing Violent Femmes piano-cello duets, as well as the use of a pair of eternally making-out high schoolers as a visual clue to denote the passage of time. Perhaps there is no better actor to express such quiet frustration as Thompson, who plays Hal with a particular melancholy that suggests he would've made an excellent stand-in for Harold and Maude star Bud Cort during the 1970s. The comparison fits not only because of Thompson's unassuming demeanor, but also because Blitz's film feels as though it belongs more to that era, however timeless this underdog yarn may be.

If there is a quibble to be had with Rocket Science, it's that some of the film's more obvious attempts to be different actually wind up having the opposite effect. There is a clinical, disembodied voice that narrates the film, whose perfect speech contrasts with the main character, but doesn't do much to serve the story. By the same token, the film occasionally drifts to the kind of outsized reality that only a story filled with characters whose names are as vivid as Hal Hefner and Ben Wekselbaum can have, which conflicts with the inherently honest portrait of high school that Blitz and crew work so hard to maintain. Still, as fate would have it, Rocket Science might prove to be the handiwork of a burgeoning cinematic genius.

— Stephen Saito