VIEW FILM STILLS

READ MORE: The Heat Is on Hawke

Love-struck twentysomething males almost always behave like insufferable clods; it’s endemic to the condition. If one is looking to make art out of depicting that condition — popular art, I mean, art that intends to entertain or at the very least engage — it’s usually helpful to give whatever love-struck twentysomething male one is depicting some qualities to counter the insufferable cloddiness, so your putative audience has a better time and doesn’t just see the guy as, well, insufferable. Qualities that have been known to work include boyish charm, moral fortitude, verbal wit — that sort of thing.

William Harding, the protagonist of The Hottest State, written and directed by Ethan Hawke from his own novel, possesses no such virtues. All this fellow, played by Mark Webber, has is a couple of bad lines and a really shitty haircut. Once William, a struggling — whaddya know? — actor happens upon aspiring singer Sara (Moreno) in a bar and is struck by what some refer to as the Sicilian Thunderbolt, he sets himself up for heartbreak. Not by falling for a bad apple, mind you, but by incessantly browbeating Sara over the fact that she’s not as dizzy over him as he is over her. She came to New York to be on her own, she insists; the substance of his counter is, for the most part, “You did not.”

And when she somehow fails to be convinced by this logic, he turns almost violently abusive. The film’s record of his appalling behavior could be said to illuminate some important but unpleasant emotional truths, but, then again, so could a random episode of The Jerry Springer Show. It’s all William’s parents’ fault, we find, but we kind of figured that, and by the time it’s spelt out we are way past caring anyway. If watching a petulant twit tell Moreno to “fuck off” for about two hours is your idea of Saturday night, this is the movie for you.

Hawke handles his own material competently, film-wise, although he makes some unusual choices — a handheld camera simulation of a dolly-in during a fraught dinner scene managed to raise my eyebrow. The problem is, as you may have inferred by now, the material itself, with its trite observations and shockingly flat writing. “In the room the scent of sex was thick,” William says in a voiceover. Thick as what, one wonders. Later, he narrates, “The morning Sara returned from Boston I was singing a different tune. It went something like, ‘I’m sorry.’” I presume this stuff’s from the novel, in which case I’m sorry, too — sorry that I’m not a movie star who can get such dribble published in hardcover.