Director Josh Trank’s first movie Chronicle could be described as this generation’s Carrie, but that seems unfair to a movie that stands so defiantly on its own two feet. It could be described as one of the best comic book films made in years, but it wasn’t based on any comic book. It could be described as a faux documentary about super powers, but while all the footage is done with handheld cameras, security tapes, etc, there’s no real explanation given for who’s collecting the footage. So let’s call it what it is on its own terms—a brutally realistic examination of the actual results of three seemingly “ordinary” high school kids who gain extraordinary powers of telekinesis through a phenomenon neither they nor the audience truly understand. Instead of being crime-stoppers or going on some world saving quest, they mostly use their newfound gifts for fun, like playing touch football at thirty thousand feet ducking airplanes all the while, for childish pranks at a local store, and for wowing everyone at the school talent show. Some of their stunts though, display signs of maliciousness even danger; and we soon start to see tragedy unfolding before our eyes.
Trank did both an excellent job with direction (ironically his cheap hand held camera style effects look far more realistic than for instance the $200 million Green Lantern did), and his screenwriting is top-notch. Trank himself is in his twenties and his “ear” for how high school students talk and behave is so perfect that half the time you feel you really are watching an painfully depressing documentary about the struggles of outsiders. Of course Trank’s job was made much easier by his three leads who even though they only met during filming on screen seem to have been friends since kindergarten with each one representing a distinct high school clique.
Michael B. Jordan (The Wire and Friday Night Lights) gives a charming and deceptively easy looking performance as football hero, class president, and all around Steve Montgomery. In a lesser movie Steve, by being of being confident and popular would be villainized but here he’s a genuinely nice sympathetic guy. Talented newcomer Alex Russell plays Matt Garrety, the Beta. Matt always claims to be above the “whole high school” thing, and is always quoting famous intellectuals and throwing around fancy words, but his struggles to play it cool at a rave, (and distance himself from his loser cousin), show he, too, craves status and acceptance as his crush object Casey (Ashley Hinshaw) points out. And then there’s the born Omega, Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan from In Treatment), a small skinny kid who’s not only relentlessly bullied at school but has even worse issues at home. His alcoholic former fire-fighter father (a menacing Michael Kelly), abuses him and, his mother (a tragic Bo Peterson), is terminally ill.
Andrew may be the social Omega but he soon develops into the strongest telekinetic of the trio to the great misfortune of everyone, most especially, Andrew himself. Dane DeHaan as Andrew is simply remarkable—a maelstrom of pain and anger waiting to burst out, but also vulnerable, funny, and at times even sweet. DeHaan has a lot of other movie projects in the works and is one to watch. So are Russell and Jordan. So’s Jim Trank. And so is this movie. It is quite simple an instant genre classic in the making and you want to be there as it happens instead of catching it on TV or video years later like my generation had to with Carrie.
